83% of Americans Want Trump Admin to End Secrecy Behind Lethal, Extrajudicial Boat Strikes

The vast majority of US voters want the Trump administration to be more transparent about its campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and other international waters, according to a new poll out Monday.

While it has faded from the headlines over the past week due to President Donald Trump's illegal overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and atdtempt to commandeer the nation's oil, his bombings of alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and elsewhere have continued into the new year.

As of January 2, the US military had disclosed 35 separate attacks to the public, with a death toll of at least 114 people in total since September. But the administration has provided scant evidence to justify the attacks.

According to an ACLU/YouGov poll released on Monday, which was conducted in late December, 83% of voters believed the administration must release its legal justifications and full, unedited videos of the lethal strikes. This includes 97% of Democrats, but also 82% of independents and 70% of Republicans.

Several media outlets reported in November that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) authored a still-classified legal opinion justifying the strikes and exempting those involved in directing them from future prosecution. The ACLU and other rights groups filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last month for the document.

The poll shows that a majority of voters—87% of Democrats, 53% of independents, and 15% of Republicans—disapproved of the strikes, while nearly seven in 10 felt that the administration has not yet shown evidence to the public justifying the bombings.

Members of both parties in Congress have called for the administration to release video of the strikes, with particular scrutiny on the September 2 "double-tap" strike in which the military bombed two shipwrecked survivors of an earlier attack.

Last month, Hegseth declined a request from Congress to release unedited video footage of the incident to the public. He had previously changed his recounting of the event multiple times, initially boasting of the attack before shunting the blame onto an underling—Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley—when the second strike was made public and met with outcry.

Trump, meanwhile, has misled the public about what drugs were supposedly on the boats. He has publicly stated that the ships were carrying fentanyl, a drug that has caused hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in the US, dubbing it a "weapon of mass destruction."

Lawmakers have said they were briefed that the ships were actually carrying cocaine, which is much less deadly, though evidence of this has also not been shown to the public.

One bombed-out ship that washed up on the shores of Colombia in late December with two mangled corpses aboard was found to have only been carrying marijuana, which is legal in more than half of all US states. Other investigations have found that some of those killed in the strikes were fishermen or others not connected to the drug trade.

While the September 2 strikes—which were reportedly given the go-ahead by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—have become the subject of a congressional inquiry, the ACLU says the entire bombing campaign is illegal.

"The US military may not, under any circumstances, execute civilians who are merely suspected of smuggling drugs," the group said last month. "Rather, the US government must first pursue non-lethal measures like arrest and demonstrate that lethal force is an absolute last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury."

Two-thirds of respondents to the poll said that rather than carry out extrajudicial executions, they would prefer that the Coast Guard conduct its usual operations, seizing those it suspects of transporting drugs and putting them on trial.

Meanwhile, 58% said they'd support Congress holding a public hearing with officials in charge of the strikes, such as Hegseth, while just 19% said they'd oppose it.

Just over half described killing people suspected of carrying drugs as "murder," with that belief growing even stronger with respect to the double-tap strike.

"Our polling makes clear that an overwhelming number of Americans on both sides of the aisle want Congress to step up and hold the Trump administration publicly accountable for its illegal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean,” said Christopher Anders, director of ACLU’s democracy and technology division.

“This means open hearings with the officials responsible for these murders, as well as releasing both the legal justification and unedited videos of the strikes," he continued. "Given the life-or-death stakes of the president’s use of force, it’s imperative that this transparency and accountability comes immediately.”