The Trump administration will repatriate two survivors of a deadly U.S. strike this week on suspected drug runners in the Caribbean Sea rather than prosecute them or hold them in military detention, President Trump announced on Saturday.
The men who survived were being returned to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador, “for detention and prosecution,” the president said in a posting on his Truth Social account.
Mr. Trump also posted a 29-second video showing a semi-submersible vessel that was traveling partially below the water being blown up. He said two other suspected drug smugglers, whom he called “terrorists,” had been killed in the attack.
It was not immediately possible to confirm that either Colombia or Ecuador had agreed to prosecute the two men.
Colombia had no immediate comment. An official in Ecuador, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the topic involved sensitive diplomacy, said the government was confirming that one of its nationals was among the survivors. If that were the case, the official said, he would be brought him to Ecuador.
Mr. Trump has previously described people aboard suspected drug-smuggling boats, which the United States has targeted in several deadly airstrikes since early September, as “unlawful combatants.” He has claimed the authority, widely disputed by legal experts, to summarily kill such suspects in military strikes as if they were enemy soldiers in a war.
It was a sharp break from the traditional handling of maritime smuggling, in which the Coast Guard would intercept boats and arrest people if suspicions proved accurate.
The decision to transfer the two survivors, however, was in line with the Coast Guard’s practice of repatriating or handing off to friendly countries people who were intercepted outside the United States as suspected traffickers.
It also avoided the dilemma of what to do with the first people captured in what Mr. Trump has declared a formal armed conflict against drug cartels. Holding them as indefinite wartime detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could have opened the door to a court’s reviewing whether this really is a war as part of a habeas corpus lawsuit.
Prosecuting the men in U.S. civilian court would have raised other problems. For one, it was not known if any courtroom-admissible evidence was available to demonstrate that the survivors of the attack engaged in criminal wrongdoing.
Still, avoiding legal and logistical headaches by sending the men home seemed to contradict the administration’s stance that suspected drug smugglers pose such a severe danger that Mr. Trump can have the military summarily kill them.
The Trump administration has justified its attacks on drug smuggling suspects in the Caribbean as a formal armed conflict and as national self-defense, but without offering an explanation for how it can legitimately treat the crime of drug smuggling as if it were an armed attack or combat.
The administration has stressed that about 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year. But the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico, not South America, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service.
Mr. Trump asserted in his post that intelligence had “confirmed” that the semi-submersible craft had been “loaded up with mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics” and that “at least 25,000 Americans would die if I allowed this submarine to come ashore.” He did not offer evidence for his assertion about what it was carrying, or about the possible consequences if the vessel reached the United States.
The two men were the only survivors of a military strike late Thursday on a so-called semi-submersible vessel that was traveling partially below the water, a familiar profile of smugglers in the Caribbean. Three U.S. officials with knowledge of the operation said Special Operations aircraft had fired on the vessel in the southern Caribbean after U.S. intelligence analysts assessed it was carrying some kind of drugs.
Minutes after the strike, analysts watching on a video feed from a surveillance aircraft noticed what appeared to be at least two survivors bobbing in the water amid the smoldering wreckage of the craft, the officials said. There were also several floating bales, they added.
The Times has not seen the surveillance video. The Pentagon declined to comment.
Navy and Coast Guard helicopters were dispatched to the scene, and the two men were rescued and brought to the nearby amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, they said. The ship has medical facilities.
The attack on the semi-submersible was the sixth known strike by the U.S. military on vessels suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea since Sept. 2. The administration has said the previous attacks combined killed 29 people.
On Saturday, the officials said, the Pentagon transferred legal custody of the two detainees to the State Department, which was preparing to repatriate them. Their physical whereabouts and the mechanics of any impending transfer were not immediately known.
The apparent resolution of the fate of the two survivors, requiring diplomatic contacts, comes amid a large military buildup in the region that has focused on drug cartels and criminal gangs based in Venezuela.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Edward Wong and Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
The post U.S. Is Repatriating Survivors of Its Strike on Suspected Drug Vessel appeared first on New York Times.
