(WASHINGTON) — When President Donald Trump and Defense officials revealed on Sept. 2 that the U.S. military killed 11 alleged drug smugglers on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, they touted it as a success in their war against South American cartels.
Their initial comments were met with scrutiny due to the lack of details they provided. More questions arose months later after it was reported that survivors from the attack were killed in a subsequent strike. The White House later confirmed on Monday that there was more than one strike on the boat.
Trump first announced the strike on his social media site as a “kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.”
The post included a video of the strike that showed only one hit.
Trump alleged that the boat was under the control of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro denied the allegations and criticized the U.S. for the attack.
Trump said a day later that a “massive” amount of drugs was on the boat, but provided little detail.
“It was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. And, everybody fully understands that fact. You see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat, and they were hit,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Sept. 3. “When they watch that tape, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s not do this.'”
That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also touted the strike during a “Fox & Friends” interview and refuted a Maduro spokesperson’s suggestion that the video was AI-generated.
“That was definitely not artificial intelligence. I watched it live,” he said. “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented.”
The administration would go on to report 20 more strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people.
Hegseth spoke about the U.S. operation on Oct. 23 at a White House event on fighting drug cartels, arguing that suspects on the boats would be treated “like foreign terrorist organizations on the offense.”
“So the Department of War is not going to degrade, or just simply arrest. We’re going to defeat and destroy these terrorist organizations to defend the homeland on behalf of the American people,” he said.
His remarks came a week after survivors were reported following a strike on a boat in the Caribbean. The survivors eventually were released to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador, which prevented them from protesting their detention in a U.S. court.
When asked by ABC News’ Mary Bruce about how survivors would be treated in the future, Hegseth responded, “We’ve got protocol of how we’ll handle it,” but did not go into detail.
At the same event, Trump told reporters that he didn’t plan to ask Congress for authority or declare war against the cartels, and instead he declared bluntly, “We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.”
However, new questions arose about the legality of the attacks after a Nov. 28 Washington Post report that said the first strike on Sept. 2 initially left two survivors clinging to the wreckage and that before the strike Hegseth had given spoken orders to kill everyone on board.
The Post report, which cited two “two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” alleged that Adm. Mitch Bradley, then-head of the Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a second strike in order to comply with Hegseth’s initial orders and to ensure the survivors couldn’t call on other suspected traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.
Members of Congress from both parties had expressed concerns with the drug cartel operation, but in the days following the Washington Post report, Republican and Democratic leaders on both the House and Senate armed services committees put out joint statements saying they were looking into the incident.
Hegseth pushed back against the Post’s report saying in an X post that the strikes were legal.
ABC News has confirmed that survivors from the initial strike were killed as a result.
Trump told reporters Sunday that he did not know about the details about the Washington Post’s report and defended Hegeseth.
“He said he did not say that, and I believe him,” Trump said when asked about the report and Hegseth’s alleged order.
Trump added that he wouldn’t have wanted a second strike.
“I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine, and if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence,” he said.
On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley gave the order for the second strike, but did not give any more details.
The next day, Hegseth doubled down on the administration’s efforts to attack alleged drug boats.
“We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,” he said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Hegseth also clarified his earlier comments about watching the attack live.
“As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs,” he said. “So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that the commander had made the — which he had the complete authority to do.”
“Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back,” Hegseth added.
Hegseth said that he did not see any survivors while he watched the video.
“I did not personally see survivors, but I stand — because that thing was on fire. It was exploded and fire and smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the ‘fog of war.'”
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
