Families of two men killed in Trump's military boat strikes sue US government
Source: The Guardian
Civil rights attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against the United States government on Tuesday on behalf of the families of two men from a small fishing village in Trinidad who were killed in a US military airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 14 October.
The lawsuit, shared in advance with the Guardian, says that Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both of Las Cuevas, Trinidad, were returning to Trinidad from Venezuela when they and four other people were killed in the strike. It was the fifth attack announced by the White House under Donald Trump’s campaign against the small go-fast boats the administration claims are connected to cartels and gangs.
The suit was filed four days after the administration announced the 36th such boat attack on Friday, this one in the eastern Pacific. The death toll of the boat strikes stands around at least 117 people dead so far.
The lawsuit said the strikes were illegal. “These killings patently lack any plausible legal justification,” the lawsuit said. “Thus, they were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.” Legal scholars have said the strikes, launched against civilians in boats far from the US, are violations of domestic and international law. The Trump administration maintains they are legal, under a secret opinion written by the justice department that argues the US is in an armed conflict with cartels and that the laws of war apply to the strikes.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/27/trump-military-boat-strikes-lawsuit
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The families of two Trinidadian men who were killed in an Oct. 14 strike on an alleged drug boat accused the U.S. in a lawsuit Tuesday of wrongful death and extrajudicial killings.
First wrongful death lawsuit filed against Trump administration over drug boat strikes www.nbcnews.com/politics/whi...
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/first-wrongful-death-lawsuit-filed-trump-administration-drug-boat-stri-rcna256022
The lawsuit is the first of its kind to be filed against the Trump administration in federal court over its military campaign against alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, were killed in the U.S. military strike Oct. 14 while they were on a boat traveling from Venezuela to Trinidad, their family members allege in the lawsuit. The lawsuit says Joseph and Samaroo “had been fishing in waters off the Venezuelan coast and working on farms in Venezuela.” It says they were returning to their homes in Las Cuevas in Trinidad and Tobago when their boat was struck.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump said the strike killed all six men on the boat. Trump described them as “six male narcoterrorists” and said that the boat was “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization” and that it “was trafficking narcotics.” The strike was the administration’s fifth in a campaign that has struck three dozen boats and killed at least 125 people, according to the Defense Department, since it began in early September.....
The lawsuit quotes the Trinidadian government as saying that “the government has no information linking Joseph or Samaroo to illegal activities” and that it had “no information of the victims of U.S. strikes being in possession of illegal drugs, guns, or small arms.”
Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister say in the lawsuit that the two men were the primary breadwinners for their families and were simply returning home from working in Venezuela when they were killed.