On September 15, 2025, the Trump White House announced, again, that it had carried out a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean. According to the administration, three people were killed. This is the second such strike in two weeks. On September 2, eleven people were riding in a small speed boat in international waters when they were also killed by a US military strike. The summary executions were captured on film and posted boastfully to social media by the US government.

The Trump administration has offered as a rationale for these killings that the individuals were part of a Venezuelan cartel and involved in drug running. Claiming that drug cartels are terrorists and that drug overdoses mean drug traffickers pose a threat to the United States, the administration has claimed this lethal military action was justified. They have offered no evidence any of the individuals were involved in drug trafficking or part of a cartel.

And the administration has given inconsistent explanations about exactly what happened. After the first strike on a speedboat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially claimed the boat wasn’t even headed to the US but to another island in the Caribbean. The administration then changed its tune, claiming the four-engine speedboat was headed from Venezuela to the United States. It was also revealed that the boat had turned around after getting spooked by a US military craft flying ahead. The US military repeatedly fired on the boat in order to kill survivors of the initial attack.