The video showed a boat speeding through the water. Two men went down with the flames. No drugs were found. The administration called it war—the killing remains the only evidence.

Since the Trump administration began its campaign against those it labels “narcoterrorists” in early September, at least two hundred and seven people have died in these strikes. On Wednesday, the U.S. military attacked a vessel in the eastern Pacific, asserting it was a targeted operation against drug-smuggling routes. U.S. Southern Command stated the vessel was along known lanes. The Pentagon provided no photographs, no seized contraband, no forensic data to prove the boat carried anything but the sea. The cold geometry of war, the phrase “targeted the alleged drug traffickers,” furnishes no evidentiary substrate for the presence of illicit cargo. The pattern held during the strikes seen on April 26 and the carnage reported on May 31, when three more men burned. The machinery of the state moves with the same steady, administrative rhythm. It handles the targeting screen, the joystick, the release of the incendiary load. The absence of evidence does not pause the trigger.

Donald, your throat closes when you swallow. It is the same constriction the men felt when they breathed the white smoke pouring off their burning hull. Your shoulders ache in the exact line of the men pulling against a current they could not outrun. The metallic taste of salt water sits under your tongue when you reach for your coffee. It does not leave. You cannot wash it out.

You call this an armed conflict. You draw the line in the ocean and call it a battlefield. You have killed two hundred and seven people. You hold a briefing and say you are stopping overdoses. The men in the water did not overdose. The deadness in the language of Southern Command is a sentence built to erase the person inside the boat. If the vessel is on a “known route,” it is a target. If it is a target, it is not carrying men who have mothers, brothers, lives that exist outside the crosshairs. The apparatus has replaced the individual with a target-category. It organizes the world into what can be burned and what can be ignored.

While the men drowned before dawn in the chill of the Pacific, you were asleep in warm sheets. While the smoke choked the sea, you were reading your briefings. Your hands are clean. They are also empty. You reached for a lever that was not calibrated to a war. You reached for a lever that was calibrated to a fantasy.

The salt water does not ask for credentials. Donald, picture your daughter in the current. The cold does not care. The salt fills her lungs the same way.

You are a small man, Donald, with large hands on the switch. You wear the bomber jacket like a costume. You strike your chest and call it strength. You are a toddler in his father’s oversized uniform, pressing the red button because it makes a loud noise.

The water does not care about his fantasy. The water does not care about his war. The water takes them. Two hundred and seven souls have been taken. Their lungs are full. The ocean remains wide, and deep, and it keeps the records the administration has tried to turn into smoke. The sea does not forget.

“And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts.”

Malachi 3:5