The families of two Trinidadian men killed in October during a U.S. strike on boats off the coast of Venezuela filed a wrongful-death lawsuitagainst the Trump administration on Tuesday.
The lawsuit is the first filed against the White House in federal court in response to President Donald Trump’s lethal attacks on boats that the administration alleges were carrying illegal drugs to the United States. In the suit, the families of the two men accused the U.S. government of conducting extrajudicial killings and of falsely characterizing the men as drug smugglers.
Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, fished in waters off the Venezuelan coast to sustain themselves, according to the lawsuit. They were returning to their homes in Las Cuevas — in the neighboring Trinidad and Tobago — on Oct. 14 when their boat was hit as part of the U.S.’s lethal strikes.
U.S. officials, including Trump, have said that six alleged drug smugglers were killed in that strike. Trump describedthe men in a social media post as “narco-terrorists” and said U.S. intelligence “confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics” and “was associated with illicit narco-terrorist networks.”
The lawsuit claims that Joseph and Samaroo “were not members of, or affiliated with, drug cartels” and that the Trinidadian government has publicly stated that it has no information linking either man to illegal activities.
Representatives for the White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Pentagon said the department does not comment on ongoing litigation.
The U.S. military has carried out 36 strikes on vessels at sea since Sept. 2, killing at least 125 people, according to data released by the Pentagon. They have occurred in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, targeting suspected drug smuggling routes.
The strike campaign is underpinned by a controversial Justice Department opinion that argued that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” waged under Trump’s Article II authorities, which vaguely give the chief executive power to enforce U.S. laws.
The opinion asserts that drug cartels are selling drugs to finance a campaign of violence and extortion and appears to be part of a legally questionable strategy to twist the campaign into a law-of-war framework to use force, analysts have said.
In the Tuesday lawsuit, the families claim that the U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict that would justify the use of lethal military force against the boats. The complaint adds that, even during wartime, the strikes would still be illegal because the laws of war constrain the indiscriminate and direct use of force against civilians and civilian vessels.
The Trump administration has defended the strikes, claiming that they are legal action against “narco-terrorists” and well-researched. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has compared the campaign to U.S. military operations against al-Qaeda militants overseas, saying in December that “if you’re working for a designated terrorist organization and you bring drugs to this country in a boat, we will find you and we will sink you.”
Hegseth has said that military officials know “exactly” who is on the boats they strike and “exactly what they were doing.” But the Pentagon has released little intelligence about who the individuals are.
The families’ lawsuit notes that the U.S. government “has not publicly identified all of the drug cartels with which it claims to be at war, and with respect to nearly all its boat strikes, including the one on October 14, it has not identified any cartel it was purportedly targeting.”
The lawsuit also notes that the Trump administration has not made public “any evidence at all” to support its assertions that the boats it targeted and the people killed “were members of, or even affiliated with, the drug cartels,” nor has it provided any evidence that the boats were carrying drugs.
The strike campaign has alarmed lawmakers, including some Republicans, especially after details about the first strike on Sept. 2 were released.
Hegseth ordered a U.S. missile strike that day against a boat off the Trinidad coast that was carrying 11 people, and the top officer overseeing the mission, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered a follow-up strike after it was determined that two people were still alive and clinging to the wreckage. Bradley, after consulting with other military officials, determined that they were still legitimate military targets trying to continue their mission, he later told lawmakers.
Hegseth has defended Bradley’s decision, and Trump, in turn, has defended Hegseth’s leadership.
The campaign has raised other thorny legal questions, including about what to do when the U.S. military recovers survivors at sea.
In the past, when the Coast Guard has interdicted suspected drug vessels, it often has detained those involved for potential prosecution. After U.S. troops rescued two survivors of an Oct. 16 strike, however, the Trump administration released the suspected drug smugglers, avoiding legal challenges that could have emerged about whether the campaign amounts to armed conflict.
The Trinidadian families are suing the Trump administration under the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute. The first allows family members to sue over wrongful deaths occurring more than three nautical miles from the U.S. shore, and the latter allows foreign nationals to sue the United States for violations of international law.
The lawsuit states that the men’s families found out about the Oct. 14 strike from news reports and social media posts. After not hearing from the men since Oct. 12, the families concluded that the two were passengers on the boat. They have since held memorial services for them.
The lawsuit lists Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister as plaintiffs, acting on behalf of surviving family members. The two women are being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School and the ACLU of Massachusetts.
The women, the lawsuit states, “demand accountability for U.S. officials’ brazen acts — taken in wanton disregard of the most elementary principles of law and humanity — that took away their loved ones forever.”
“Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again,” Sallycar Korasingh, Samaroo’s sister, said in a statement Tuesday. “If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him.”
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