A group of civil rights advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Trump administration, seeking the release of a legal memo and other documents related to lethal U.S. military strikes on boats suspected of trafficking drugs from Latin America.
The complaint alleges that the nearly two dozen boat strikes carried out since September are illegal and that the public deserves to see how President Donald Trump’s administration has justified them. The strikes have killed at least 87 people.
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” Jeffrey Stein, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement Tuesday.
The ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. According to the complaint, the groups filed a freedom of information request with several federal agencies on Oct. 15 seeking the release of a legal opinion from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel. The Washington Post reported that the memo argued the country is in a “non-international armed conflict” with unspecified “drug cartels.”
None of the agencies has released those records, the complaint states.
As The Post reported last month, the classified opinion — which was drawn up over the summer and has not been made public — states that personnel taking part in military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in Latin America would not be exposed to future prosecution.
Representatives for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
Representatives for the Justice Department and the Pentagon declined to comment.
The organizations said in their Tuesday statement that the U.S. “is not, and could not be, in an armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels,” contrary to the Trump administration’s statements. They noted that, under international law, an armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor exists only if the non-state actor is an “organized armed group” that is structured and disciplined like regular armed forces and is engaged in “protracted armed violence” against the United States.
“There is no plausible argument that any drug cartel satisfies this test vis-à-vis the United States,” the organizations said.
“The Trump administration is displacing the fundamental mandates of international law with the phony wartime rhetoric of a basic autocrat,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
One of the military strikes occurred off the coast of Venezuela on Sept. 2. In the operation, elite Special Operations forces attacked a boat carrying 11 people — whom the administration alleged were drug smugglers — and then struck again, after observing that there were two survivors among the wreckage. Details of the incident, which were first reported by The Post late last month, have raised questions among Democrats and law of war experts about whether the men’s killing was unlawful.
The organizations argue in their lawsuit that the U.S. military may not “summarily kill civilians who are merely suspected of smuggling drugs.”
“It must first pursue nonlethal measures like arrest and demonstrate that lethal force is an absolute last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury,” the lawsuit states. The advocacy groups note that the Trump administration has said it will continue with these strikes, despite bipartisan concerns about the attacks.
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