US Southern Command said in a statement that its forces bombed an alleged drug-running boat in the Caribbean on Saturday, killing at least three people, as the Trump administration continues to conduct extrajudicial executions at sea.
“On September 19, under the direction of US Southern Command, Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean,” SOUTHCOM said.
As usual, SOUTHCOM offered no evidence to back up its claim that the small boat was carrying drugs, something the Pentagon has never done since the bombing campaign began in September 2025.
The statement labeled the four people who were killed as “narco-terrorists,” a term the administration has employed in its attempts to justify executing people for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
The attack brings the total number of people killed in the bombing campaign since it started to at least 234, according to a count from The Intercept, which has noted that all of the dead are civilians.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has introduced a resolution to impeach US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for a number of reasons, including his role in the boat strike campaign, which the articles filed by Massie describe as “extrajudicial killings.”
Massie’s resolution states that by “subjecting persons merely suspected of criminal conduct to lethal military force without judicial process, without Congressional authorization, and without establishing a lawful basis for treating such persons or vessels as military targets, Secretary Hegseth arrogated to himself and the Executive Branch the roles of judge, jury, and executioner and asserted a unilateral power to determine who may live and who may die.”
