A federal judge dealt a blow on Wednesday to the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold a Justice Department memo that deems lawful the Pentagon’s disputed policy of summarily killing suspected drug smugglers at sea.
In a 66-page opinion, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of Federal District Court in Manhattan rejected two arguments the government made for secrecy. He also ordered the government to submit the memo within two weeks for his confidential review.
The ruling was a modest victory for legal groups that filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking disclosure of the administration’s legal reasoning, but it does not mean the memo will become public soon. Even if the administration does not appeal, several issues remain to be litigated.
Still, the ruling renewed attention to the operation. Since September 2025, the campaign has carried out 70 known strikes, killing more than 230 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, but it has become overshadowed by President Trump’s war in Iran.
The Justice Department press office did not respond to a request for comment.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called the killings murders because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians and civilian objects, and people who commit crimes do not lose their protected civilian status. The critics have accused Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of giving illegal orders.
The Trump administration has asserted that it may lawfully fire missiles at small boats the Pentagon suspects of smuggling drugs instead of interdicting them through traditional law-enforcement methods. The basis for that claim is that Mr. Trump has declared the United States to be in a formal, armed conflict with a secret list of drug cartels, without congressional authorization.
That legal argument is detailed in a memo of more than 40 pages by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which the government has said reflected an interagency consensus. The memo’s disclosure is at issue in the lawsuit before Judge Engelmayer. Although The New York Times has described its contents based on interviews with people who have read it, the memo remains off limits to the public.
Judge Engelmayer’s ruling was the first major development in the lawsuit filed in December by the legal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the coldblooded murder of hundreds of civilians,” said Jeffrey Stein, an A.C.L.U. lawyer.
The Trump administration invoked several privileges to justify withholding the memo, including those protecting the confidentiality of deliberations before decisions were made, and attorney-client communications. But the judge cited numerous statements by officials who cited the memo as defining the policy they were following, and ruled that those statements overcame the privileges.
“The agency defendants cannot claim surprise from this consequence of the executive branch’s repeated public statements embracing the O.L.C. memo — and it only — as setting out the legal parameters for the boat strikes,” Judge Engelmayer wrote.
The judge is still weighing whether the memo could be withheld on the ground that it was confidential advice to the president, but he appeared skeptical that it had been closely held enough to qualify. He ordered the government to identify everyone granted access to the memo since its completion in September 2025.
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