Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to a report that he ordered the military to kill all passengers aboard a boat suspected of ferrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea in September.
According to The Washington Post, the Sept. 2 boat strike initially left two survivors clinging to the boat. The Post alleges Adm. Mitch Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, then ordered a second strike in order to comply with Hegseth’s orders and to ensure the survivors couldn’t call on other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.
In a post on X on Friday, Hegseth said the strikes were intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.”
“Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command,” Hegseth said.
If true, it is unclear why Bradley wouldn’t have ordered troops to collect the survivors and their cargo from the water, as the military did in a subsequent strike when two survivors were taken aboard a Navy ship via helicopter. Those survivors were later repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia, although some legal experts said the survivors could have been prosecuted in federal court for smuggling narcotics.
SOCOM also declined to comment on the report.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives to brief Senators on US military activity in the Caribbean and Pacific, at the US Capitol in Washington, November 5, 2025.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
One person familiar with details of the Sept. 2 incident confirmed to ABC News that there were survivors from an initial strike on the boat and that those survivors were killed in subsequent strikes. ABC News has not confirmed, though, the specifics of orders from Hegseth or Bradley.
Critics of the Trump administration and some legal experts have questioned the legality of the strikes. Under the Geneva Conventions, wounded or sick combatants are to be collected and cared for by either side in a conflict.
A top Republican senator, Roger Wicker, has joined his Democratic counterpart in calling for “vigorous oversight to determine the facts” of allegations that the military intentionally killed survivors of a boat strike.
“The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” said Sen. Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
There have been more than 20 airstrikes against vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing more than 80 people.
Trump and his top advisers say U.S. intelligence clearly shows that the boats are smuggling illegal narcotics. They argue the strikes are legal because Trump has designated drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Many legal experts say that line of thinking, though, is unprecedented and say the U.S. should be relying on law enforcement — not the military — to seize shipments and arrest suspected criminals.
