The Boat Strikes Aren’t Part of a War. They’re Murder.

On Sept. 2, 2025, the U.S. military bombed a small boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. After the first strike, the drone circled back on the wreckage. Lawmakers who saw the unreleased Department of Defense footage described two male survivors who were in “clear distress” and “clinging [to] wreckage.” The U.S. military met their signals for aid with a bomb.

The details of this particular boat strike—the first of 67 strikes that have killed at least 223 people—shocked many. During war, executing those who have been shipwrecked is illegal and U.S. forces are obligated to treat them humanely. Personnel across the Department of Defense know that without needing to check a manual. (Though it is also spelled out explicitly in the manuals.) Several lawmakers across the political spectrum described the second strike as a war crime.

Although the killing of those men holding on to debris was horrific, it was not a war crime. War crimes are violations of the law of armed conflict that take place in armed conflict. By contrast, all of these boat strikes conducted by the U.S. military—including the second strike that killed those men clinging to debris—are extrajudicial killings. That is, they are deliberate killings that are outside the law: That means murder under domestic criminal statutes, and now likely crimes against humanity under international law.

Think of it this way: At any time, U.S. security forces—whether police or the military—cannot shoot people in the streets merely because they are illegally trafficking drugs or affiliated with groups that traffic drugs and pose no imminent threat to life or serious bodily injury. The authorities have to arrest, charge, and try them. The only difference in these boat strikes is that the people being targeted are some miles off the coast. Because the military is summarily executing people who pose no imminent threat, that constitutes the unlawful taking of life, more commonly known as murder.

In their efforts to explain the boat strikes to the public and respond to Trump’s illegal uses of force, many members of Congress seem to have missed some simple core truths: The president of the United States may not direct summary executions of individuals suspected of crimes. U.S. law forbids such killing sprees and labels them, once again, murder.

Some lawmakers have articulated this sentiment, with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) labeling the strikes as “extrajudicial killings” and “murder” and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declaring that the strikes are “extrajudicial killings,” “akin to what China does, to what Iran does with drug dealers.” But despite some agreement across the aisle, this perspective does not seem to be catching on. In addition to calling the first strike a war crime, lawmakers have also incorrectly described the series of strikes as a war and have complained that the president has not come to Congress for a war authorization. Lawmakers are missing the basic truth, which is that the U.S. is committing mass murder.

Lawmakers have an obligation to uphold the law and conduct oversight of the executive when it is violating it, especially crimes of this magnitude. Those obligations lie in the Constitution, including, but not limited to, in Article I, Sections 1, 3, and 8. As key participants in the treaty ratification and foreign policy-making process, they also have a role to play in ensuring the U.S. upholds human rights, and as lawmakers, in zealously guarding the line that divides peace and wartime. These duties and functions are in tension with a Congress that cannot quickly recognize presidentially directed murder, immediately demand that it stop, and pursue appropriate accountability measures.

Perhaps this is happening because the legislative branch has grown accustomed to the United States’ constant war footing, for which it is largely responsible. After the attacks on 9/11, Congress chose to pass a broad war authorization, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the executive branch to use all necessary and appropriate force against those who had attacked the United States and those who supported the attackers. The AUMF had no named enemy, geographic scope, or time limit. Twenty-five years later, after all U.S. forces have withdrawn from Afghanistan, the law is still on the books.

In all of those years, in addition to a broadly scoped AUMF, Congress failed to clearly distinguish the line between peace and war, appropriating trillions of dollars to spend on rooting out “terror”—a tactic, not an enemy. In other words, it largely rejected law enforcement as the preeminent framework to combat groups abroad that engage in terrorism and invested heavily in an indefinite war posture for the U.S. and its partners. It is possible Congress’s role as authorizer and funder of various forever wars—which continue today—has desensitized it to armed conflict, especially against an alleged “terrorist” enemy—and left it untethered from its human rights obligations.

Both parties have contributed to this shift from peacetime as the norm into a permanent armed conflict mindset against “terrorist” groups. (See various administrations’ expansion of the law to substantiate more killing.) To justify the boat strikes, Trump has asserted that as president he can determine the U.S. is at war with “narco-terrorists” and thus legally is able to target them.

To many Americans who have watched decades of drone strikes against non-state groups the executive branch has described as terrorists and determined the U.S. military can lawfully target, the boat strikes might seem like business as usual. But they are distinct. Notwithstanding the many valid criticisms of the ways in which executive branch lawyers have interpreted the AUMF, the drone strikes against al-Qaeda and its affiliates were at least tethered to that congressional authorization and, generally speaking, part of actual wars. By contrast, Trump’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific are no doubt extrajudicial killings. It is lawmakers’ job to know that and speak the truth plainly.

Understanding the distinction is important for several reasons.

A Reality Check

First, to refute Trump’s attempts at fabricating reality, lawmakers need to appreciate that under international law the existence of a war—which would trigger the law of war and allow the use of lethal force as a first resort between the parties—is a factual matter, not something that can simply be declared. To prove the existence of a war requires a fact-based analysis that, in this case, would mean demonstrating the necessary duration and intensity of a conflict between a state and an organized armed group. Experts have provided thorough analyses on this issue, demonstrating no war exists.

Citing “1984” might sound hyperbolic, but here it is an apt analogy. In George Orwell’s dystopic setting, the ruling party controlled the narrative of truth and memory, regardless of reality: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” The White House is doing the same. In a report to Congress, the Trump administration argued that the president alone “determined” an ongoing war exists between the U.S. and secretly alleged drug traffickers. Since the law of war allows for the lawful killing of enemy forces, this is a convenient narrative for the president (it was a similarly convenient narrative for Trump that attacking Venezuela was not a war but a “law enforcement operation”). It is convenient because if the U.S. were in fact at war with these groups, there would be a legal basis for Trump to use lethal force as a first resort against them.

But stripped of that White House-asserted fantasy, all of the boat strikes are executions conducted outside the context of war, illegal under domestic and international law (as is evident in U.S. statutes, policies, reports, and the landmark human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States has been a party since 1992). If lawmakers continue to yield to Trump’s fabricated wartime paradigm—either through allegations of war crimes or by labeling boat strikes as war—they bolster his phony narrative and absolve him of his crimes.

Red Herrings

Second, lawmakers must be attuned to the fact that misunderstanding the boat strikes as part of a war has wasted valuable time on red herrings when the heart of the matter is simple: All of the boat strikes are murder.

While some members have gone so far as to label the Sept. 2 strike a war crime, many members of Congress have expressed concern that President Trump has not come to them for permission to use military force against the boats. But Congress long ago legislated this issue, twice, in murder statutes in Title 18—which states that murder is the ”unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought” and the Uniform Code of Military Justice—which similarly states that a “person subject to this chapter who, without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being” is guilty of murder.

Instead of making clear that Congress has already weighed in, many members have repeatedly claimed there has been no authorization of military force in the context of the strikes and that Trump is conducting these unsanctioned operations without Congress, leaving the impression that the president’s error is merely in failing to check a constitutional box. If the president were to direct the killing of alleged drug traffickers in U.S. cities, the appropriate response from Congress would not be “Ask us first.” This is why it makes more sense for the crux of Congress’s argument to be that Trump is summarily executing people, rather than fighting over which branch gets to decide to do so.

Some lawmakers have tried to stop the boat strikes through attempts to pass War Powers Resolutions. For example, Senate Democrats introduced a resolution to end Trump’s boat strikes, but after being put to a vote in October 2025, it failed absent Republican support—Sens. Paul and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) were the only two Republicans to vote in favor. These resolutions have some useful procedural mechanisms and, if successful, could potentially stop the strikes. But as these votes fail in a majority-Republican Congress, they become merely a messaging tool, and they are sending the wrong message—that the U.S. is at war with drug traffickers. Although lawmakers appear to have good intentions in stopping the strikes, their continued use of resolutions is another example of Congress extending the “global war on terror” paradigm—by arguing over which branch gets to decide when the U.S. is at war with alleged terrorist groups (undeniably, Congress)—instead of insisting on the proper framing, which is human rights and domestic criminal law.

Another red herring legislators have fixated on is the Defense Department’s targeting criteria, which, while the details are classified, some senators have noted do not include the requirement of drugs or weapons on the boat. But it is erroneous to provide a contrast between striking boats with drugs or weapons and those without—either way it is murder. Just like it would be murder if a policeman shot someone on the street in the U.S. merely because they were transporting drugs. The Defense Department’s targeting criteria are a distraction; the key message is that all of these strikes are extrajudicial killings.

Accountability

If a new administration or foreign court pursues accountability for war crimes related to the boat strikes, they would first have to establish a war existed. An analysis of the facts shows that the only “war” that has existed in the Caribbean and Pacific since September 2025 is the one fabricated by the Trump administration. There can be no accountability for war crimes without an actual war.

Accurately conveying the administration and military’s crimes to the public is crucial to garnering support for accountability measures. History demonstrates that it is nearly impossible to successfully prosecute high-level U.S. officials for crimes abroad. For example, even after immediate and sustained efforts opposing torture during the Bush administration, Obama’s Department of Justice declined to prosecute anyone. Trying to convince the public at a much later date that the Trump administration executed hundreds of people would make the prospect of accountability much further out of reach.

Accountability efforts need to build momentum. If the public accepts the “war crimes” narrative, it surrenders that momentum to the technical arguments about the narrative of the wrongful acts long before we can push for justice for the real violations that occurred. To build sufficient support for accountability, leaders must repeatedly and accurately communicate to the public the gravity and nature of the crimes occurring. In this case, the crimes for which people are responsible are murder and crimes against humanity.

Mass Murder Is a Component of Trump’s Democratic Backsliding

Abandoning the wartime framing allows lawmakers to draw the line connecting mass murder and the United States’ decline toward authoritarianism.

Most governments could in theory do many harmful things to its people. Within a wide range of injurious actions a rogue government might take, at the pinnacle sits the arbitrary taking of life, a devastating and irreversible act. That is why human rights law and U.S. domestic law assert strong protections over life and prohibitions on the arbitrary use of lethal force.

Trump’s boat strikes are a fitting example of a tyrannical government’s actions. The power he claims has no limiting principles. He is declaring groups—including fake ones—as enemies and adding them to a classified kill list; he has commanded the summary execution of hundreds of people; and the U.S. military has acted at his direction without dissent.

Such is a blueprint to go after his perceived enemies at home. Under the law of war, parties to the conflict can legally kill or indefinitely detain enemy forces. Thus, under Trump’s legal fiction, he could kill or indefinitely detain Americans on the basis of alleging—in a classified setting—that they are a member of a group that he alone deems to be terrorists that the U.S. is at war with. At a time when the administration is turning its ire inward toward domestic groups, it is alarming that this blatant denial of the right to due process continues unabated.

Navigating Political Pushback

Throughout the last year, I have spoken with several congressional aides about the strikes. It is clear from those conversations that some lawmakers are worried it would be politically harmful to use words such as “murder” or “extrajudicial killings” because it could make them appear weak on drugs or too harsh on the military.

But the potential political setbacks of condemning the boat strikes can be easily resolved. The solution is simple: Highlight the fact that the boat strikes are bad drug policy. They are not putting a dent in the flow of cocaine, the narcotic that makes up the majority of drug transports at sea, nor are they stemming streams of fentanyl, which mainly comes across the land border with Mexico.

The boat strikes are also bad policy for the U.S. military, detrimental to their reputation, morale and safety. The U.S. cannot expect other nations’ militaries to uphold the legal standards of international law if it does not do so itself. Which means when the U.S. military commits atrocity crimes—grave violations of international law—it puts its own armed forces at risk of being on the receiving end of illegal acts by another country. When service members read in the news that legal experts consider them to be committing murder, that degrades their morale, and rightly so, as these actions put them at risk of criminal prosecution. It is not just a dangerous precedent for the armed forces to execute anyone the president deems, in secret, to be an enemy; it is also corrosive to the military itself. Fighting back with full-throated conviction against these murders is necessary to protect the military and its standing in the world.

Congress’s Next Steps

Congress is best positioned to create any kind of barrier to Trump’s continued killings at sea: It has the ability to pass legislation, compel information, and be a voice for the voiceless.

A first step could be as simple as clearly and repeatedly articulating the crimes that have occurred—murder and crimes against humanity—and definitively stating that the president cannot direct security forces to kill criminal suspects without due process. Even just communicating this clearly (though not through War Powers Resolutions or debates over new authorizations to use force) would help to uphold the legal standard that already exists: Peacetime is the norm and war the exception to enforcing America’s laws.

More substantive actions opposing the strikes could include exercising Congress’s power of the purse to defund the military’s ability to execute suspected drug traffickers on the high seas and on the territories of Latin America countries (especially given the recent announcement by the administration that it intends to move operations inland). This could take the form of a short provision in the National Defense Authorization Act prohibiting U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Special Operations Command from using any funding for lethal operations against drug traffickers in Latin America and on the seas. Congress can also exert more oversight by holding hearings on this issue and requiring detailed reporting from the Defense Department to enter into the public record. As a basic matter, this would help to shed light on what is happening within the department in addition to establishing a record for potential future accountability measures.

Other ways Congress might take action and show a stark contrast to the administration’s approach would be to introduce comprehensive legislation addressing the drug epidemic at home, including appropriating funds to support communities acutely affected. Studies show that public health interventions play a significant role in addressing lethal overdoses in the United States. Funding public health, rather than committing murder, would be much more beneficial to Americans who are suffering from the drug crisis.

This September will mark one year since the U.S. military began bombing boats and summarily executing people in the Western Hemisphere. Congress’s response has demonstrated an unfamiliarity with human rights law and how it governs military action in peacetime. Given all that is at stake—mass murder, a serious drug crisis, and a rogue government—it is important lawmakers get it right. There is still time.