As global attention remains fixed on the war in Iran, U.S. military operations elsewhere are continuing with little public scrutiny, including the ongoing campaign of strikes targeting suspected drug trafficking vessels in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean.
The Pentagon said this week it carried out another round of strikes against alleged “narco-trafficking” boats in the region, bringing the campaign’s total death toll to at least 168 people.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the U.S. Southern Command said in a Monday press release. “Two male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed.” This followed a near identical statement that announced the killing of five men in two separate strikes on April 11. One person reportedly survived those attacks. These represented the fourth and fifth such rounds of strikes since the U.S. and Israel launched their war in Iran in late February.
In total, the Trump administration has carried out 48 deadly strikes since September 2025, according to the civilian harm watchdog group Airways. As with previous operations, the military provided little evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. U.S. Southern Command’s X account shared a short video that shows a small boat being blown up and the vessel engulfed in smoke.
“This campaign of murder at sea has fallen out of the headlines, but the consequences are being felt in communities across the region,” said John Ramming Chappel, an adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Families wait for their loved ones to return and may never know what happened to them for certain. They have no access to recourse.”
Critics say the operations, which have not been approved by the U.S. Congress, raises serious legal and humanitarian concerns.
“The fact remains that we are not at war with the people on these boats,,” Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director of foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told RS in an email. “They are not combatants. They are civilians suspected of committing crimes, and to kill them without any due process is an unlawful extrajudicial killing.”
References to the strikes have also begun to surface in rhetoric surrounding the conflict in the Middle East. After negotiations with Iran collapsed over the weekend, President Donald Trump ordered a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and suggested similar tactics could be applied there.
"Any of these [Iranian navy ships] come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at sea,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “It is quick and brutal.”