Families of two Trinidadian fishermen killed in a Trump administration boat strike last October sued the federal government on Tuesday, calling the attack a war crime and part of an “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful U.S. military campaign.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is the first wrongful death case challenging the legality of strikes the administration has launched on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September. The Trump administration has defended the strikes as necessary to stem drug trafficking into the United States.
The lawsuit tests a fundamental question: whether the Trump administration had legal authority to launch lethal strikes against boats outside an armed conflict, and whether the two victims posed the threat the government claimed they did.
Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo were fishing in Venezuelan waters when they caught a ride home to Trinidad and Tobago on Oct. 14. They were not members of any drug cartel, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday. What followed was a missile strike that killed all six people aboard the small vessel.
“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the lawsuit states. “Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
The suit was filed by Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister at the federal courthouse in Massachusetts. It cites the Death on the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute, which permit wrongful death cases and suits by foreign nationals alleging human rights violations.
Government Response
The White House denies the characterization. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement that the strike “was conducted against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores,” and that “President Trump used his lawful authority to take decisive action against the scourge of illicit narcotics that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans.”
The lawsuit, filed by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, alleges the killings violated international law because they took place outside an armed conflict and the two men posed no imminent threat. “There were means other than lethal force that could have reasonably been employed to neutralize any such threat,” the complaint says.
A Broader Campaign
The October 14 strike was one of approximately 36 strikes the administration has conducted since early September on boats the government alleges are engaged in drug trafficking. The U.S. military confirmed Monday that the death toll from these operations has reached at least 126 people, including 116 killed immediately and 10 others presumed dead after being lost at sea.
According to Jen Nessel, a spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights, this is the first lawsuit to challenge the boat strikes’ legality in court. The ACLU is also pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking the release of the administration’s legal justification for the strikes.
Seeking Justice and Prevention
Jeffrey Stein, an ACLU lawyer, told reporters the lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial. “We’re seeking damages that can go some way towards bringing justice for these really heinous abuses of power,” Stein said. He added that the lawsuit also aims to prevent future strikes, with the hope that a U.S. court will reject what he called the Trump administration’s “frankly absurd claims about its authority to engage in these illegal strikes.”
Many legal experts say the boat strikes amount to brazen violations of the laws of armed conflict because they have been carried out without congressional authorization and at a time when there is no military conflict between the United States and drug cartels that under the laws of war could justify lethal attacks.