April 20 (UPI) — The U.S. military announced late Sunday that it has killed three men in its latest strike targeting a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean.
Seventeen people have been killed in six strikes the U.S. Southern Command has carried out in little over a week, marking one of the deadliest publicly announced stretches of the Trump administration’s monthslong anti-drug smuggling operation.
As in previous strike announcements, SOUTHCOM released little information.
The attack occurred Sunday, targeting a boat operated by a designated terrorist organization in the Caribbean, SOUTHCOM said in a statement, without naming the organization or providing evidence.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it said.
A 12-second, black-and-white clip of the strike posted to SOUTHCOM’s social media shows a boat moving across the ocean before disappearing in a large fiery explosion.
Since the first strike on Sept. 2, the U.S. military has killed at least 180 people, according to UPI’s tally of publicly released data. Fifty-five boats have been destroyed in the more than 50 strikes.
President Donald Trump argues that the use of deadly military force is warranted as the United States is in “armed conflict” with the 10 drug cartels and gangs he has designated as terrorist organizations since returning to the White House in January 2025.
The operation comes as the Trump administration seeks to expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere, including by using its military to dismantle what Trump has called “narco-terrorist networks.”
The strikes have been repeatedly condemned and their legality questioned by Democrats, rights groups, critics and United Nations experts, who accuse the Trump administration of violating international and maritime law over the use of the military to conduct law enforcement drug operations.
Last month, Ben Saul, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, lambasted the Trump administration over “its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“These serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life, which applies extraterritorially,” he said on March 13.
“The attacks were not in national self-defense, since the vessels were not engaged in any armed attack on the U.S. Drug trafficking is crime, not war.”
On Wednesday, the same day the U.S. military killed three people in a strike in the eastern Pacific, a group of Democrats, led by Rep. John Larson of Connecticut, filed six articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with one of the articles accusing him of violating the law of armed conflict over the strikes.
Larson accused Hegseth of abusing his position by ordering “our armed forces to strike boats in the Caribbean,” he said in a statement.
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