Family members of two men killed in President Donald Trump’s missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean have sued the U.S. government for wrongful death, saying the killings lacked legal justification and were therefore murder.
Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, were on their way home from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago when the U.S. military bombed their boat on October 14, killing all six passengers on board, according to a complaint filed Tuesday.
Trump posted a shocking video of the strike and claimed, without providing evidence, that the men were “narcoterrorists.”
But before they were killed, Joseph and Samaroo had been in Venezuela working on farms and fishing off the coast, according to the suit, which was filed by the ACLU and other civil rights groups on behalf of Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister.
The Trinidadian government has said it has no evidence that Joseph or Samaroo, both fathers of three children, were involved in any illegal activity.
“These premeditated and international killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the suit argues. “Thus, they were simply murders.”
The boat that was transporting them was the third of more than 35 small vessels the Trump administration has targeted to date, with an estimated 125 people killed since the campaign began on September 2. Tuesday’s suit is the first wrongful death case to come out of the campaign.
The administration claims it’s engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” against unspecified drug cartels in Latin America, and that the boats are therefore legitimate military targets.
But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own lawyers have questioned the legality of the attacks—which have not been approved by Congress—while military sources have said the Pentagon doesn’t know exactly who is on the boats it hits.
Trump and Hegseth have nevertheless “publicized videos of the boat strikes, boasting about and celebrating their own role in killing defenseless people,” according to Tuesday’s lawsuit.
The suit argues that despite the administration’s supposed legal justifications, the U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict, and even if it were, the strikes violate the laws of war, including the 1949 Geneva Convention prohibiting the direct, intentional, and unjustified killing of civilians.
It alleges the killings constitute wrongful deaths under the Death on the High Seas Act and extrajudicial killings under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign nationals to sue in U.S. courts for violations of international law.
The family members “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,” the suit says.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Department of Defense for comment.
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