Death Without Due Process: America's Undeclared War on the High Seas

When the country that invented "innocent until proven guilty" starts executing people from the sky, who exactly are we?

Nearly 200 people are dead.

According to figures published by the Associated Press this past week, the death toll from the Trump administration’s monthslong series of strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean has risen to at least 199 people. The campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, began last September. The strikes, carried out by the United States Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, show no signs of stopping.

That figure of 199 includes at least 22 people who survived an initial strike, only to be hit again or die at sea. Three people who survived two separate strikes this month are counted among the dead. The United States Southern Command says it notifies the Coast Guard of any survivors, however, those notifications are largely passed on to countries closer to the strike location.

Three people, in total, are known to have survived strikes and been rescued. Here is what else we know: boats were struck, people died, and the United States government said they were drug traffickers.

Here is what we don’t know: who any of them actually were.

The identities of those killed have never been formally released to the public, nor has any evidence been released to substantiate the claims that they were connected to drug trafficking. When pressed in congressional briefings, military officials acknowledged they do not know the identities of everyone on board the boats they have destroyed.

The legal justification for the entire operation rests on a classified Justice Department finding. Secret, in other words. The legal basis for killing nearly 200 people is itself a secret.

The Death Penalty Comparison Nobody Is Making

So, here is the uncomfortable point this country needs to sit with: drug trafficking is not a capital offense in the United States. You cannot be executed in America for moving cocaine. You cannot be put to death for smuggling fentanyl. The federal death penalty exists for a narrow set of crimes: murder under specific circumstances, treason, espionage, crimes against children. Drug trafficking, whatever its scale and whatever its toll, is not among them. A cartel kingpin convicted in a Manhattan federal courtroom gets a sentence. He gets a lawyer. He gets years of appeals. He gets to speak before his sentencing.

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is the most instructive example. The former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, a man whose organization was responsible for flooding the United States with mountains of cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine over a quarter century, whose prosecutors said ordered the torture and murder of at least 26 individuals, who twice escaped from maximum security prisons and ran what amounted to a narco-state within a state was sentenced in a Brooklyn federal courtroom in 2019 to life in prison plus 30 years.

He was also ordered to forfeit $12.6 billion. When Mexico extradited him, Washington agreed not to seek the death penalty as a condition of the transfer. El Chapo got due process. He got a trial. He got to look his family in the eye before the judge spoke.

The 199 people killed in the Caribbean and the Pacific got a missile. That gap and indifference says something, something nobody in power wants to adequately answer.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Who Executes Drug Offenders

It is also worth pausing here to note which countries do impose capital punishment for drug crimes, because Americans tend to regard them a certain way.

More than 30 countries retain the death penalty for drug-related offenses. Iran and Saudi Arabia lead the world; nearly half of all known executions in both countries in 2025 have been for drug-related crimes. China, North Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore round out the list of what researchers classify as “high application” nations, those that execute drug offenders regularly and in significant numbers. Singapore hangs people for crossing a cannabis threshold. Iran’s laws are severe enough that a person can be sentenced to death for possessing 30 grams of heroin.

America has spent decades looking at those countries and screeching: this is not who we are. The State Department issues annual reports on human rights practices abroad. Congress conditions foreign aid on legal standards. American officials stand at podiums and invoke the rule of law as the thing that distinguishes a democracy from an authoritarian state.

It is worth asking whether those officials have considered the optics of what is happening in the waters off Venezuela and Colombia.

The Legal Void

Human Rights advocacy groups have routinely stated that the strikes have no lawful basis under international law, that there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean between the United States and any drug-trafficking organization, and therefore there is no group of people who constitute a legitimate military target. The administration has labeled those killed as “unlawful combatants.”

The Pentagon watchdog announced this month that it plans to examine whether the military followed an established targeting framework when carrying out the strikes, though the inspector general’s office was careful to note the review is focused on process, not legality.

Legal experts have said that the documented practice of striking survivors — hitting people in the water after an initial attack — would constitute a violation of the laws governing armed conflict. The administration has not addressed that finding publicly.

The Trump administration insists the operations are lawful. Secretary Hegseth has said all actions are in compliance with the law of armed conflict and approved by military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command. The White House and SOUTHCOM release brief social media posts after each strike: a short statement, sometimes a video, a number of dead. Then the news cycle moves on.

A Conservative Case, a Liberal Case, and One Shared Problem

This is not a left or right issue. Conservatives who believe in American exceptionalism should be troubled by a government killing unnamed, unidentified people on the basis of classified legal memos, that is not the tradition of legitimate, law-bound power; it is what authoritarian states do with better branding.

And for those on the left, consider this: the United Nations has explicitly stated that drug offenses do not meet the international legal threshold for capital punishment — the same standard Washington invokes whenever it criticizes Iran, Singapore, or Saudi Arabia for doing exactly what we are now doing, just with more paperwork.

For everyone, the question is the same: if drug trafficking is not a capital offense on American soil, what gives the United States the right to make it one, without due process, somewhere else?