The death toll in the US military’s bombing campaign targeting alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean has climbed to over 200, a grim milestone that comes as experts say there’s no evidence that the strikes have done anything to stem the flow of drugs into the US.
While President Trump initially claimed the first strikes on boats in the Caribbean that left Venezuela targeted fentanyl shipments, fentanyl is not produced in Venezuela, and there’s no evidence that it even transits through the country on its way to the US. The Pentagon later admitted to Congress that the strikes were targeting alleged cocaine shipments, though throughout the bombing campaign, it has not provided evidence that a single boat it targeted was carrying drugs.
The New York Times published a report on Friday that cited epidemiologists, addiction scientists, and public health experts who said cocaine is as easy to get in much of the US as it was before the bombing campaign, and that the price and purity are still about the same. Numbers also show that more cocaine has been seized by Customs and Border Protection at the border and other points of entry since the strikes started.
“CBP seized 47,808 pounds of cocaine in the eight months since the strikes began, more than the 43,227 pounds the agency seized in the eight-month period before the campaign, according to official data,” the Times report said.
Besides its ineffectiveness, the bombing campaign is clearly illegal under both US and international law. The Trump administration calls the victims of the strikes “narco-terrorists” to justify what are extra-judicial executions for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
According to a count from The Intercept, since the campaign began in September 2025, the US boat strikes have killed at least 205 people, all civilians, since they were operating civilian boats, were not engaged in combat, and posed no threat to US forces at the time of their killing. Several accounts from survivors and family members of victims of other strikes that were reported by Drop Site News suggest the US has targeted fishing boats that weren’t running drugs.
The latest boat strike occurred on Saturday, when US Southern Command said its forces targeted a vessel in the Eastern Pacific and killed three “male narco-terrorists.”
