'We Don't Waste Our Time' With Courts, Says Trump, Bragging of Extrajudicial Murders in Pacific and Caribbean

Critics have often described President Donald Trump's campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific—which have taken the lives of at least 234 mostly unknown people—as extrajudicial killings that flout the very basics of due process.

On Tuesday, Trump essentially described them that way too, seeming to suggest that killing people outside the law is the whole point.

"For years, administrations just played games, and they'd bring them to a court in Miami or something, and the judge would release them immediately, and they'd go back to selling drugs," Trump said. "But now, we don't waste our time doing it."

He was speaking at a meeting of the Washington-led "Shield of the Americas" coalition, an alliance of leaders and foreign ministers ostensibly dedicated to stamping out drug cartels and other criminal organizations across the Americas.

The boat strike campaign—known first by the Defense Department as “Operation Southern Spear” before it was rebranded last month as Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—is part of this effort. The administration says the more than 70 vessels it has targeted with lethal strikes since last September were engaged in “narco-trafficking,” and that killing their operators is a justifiable form of self-defense.

The principal illicit cargo on the maritime routes targeted by Southern Spear is cocaine. But the White House rarely provides any evidence publicly to substantiate that the boats it targets are involved with drug trafficking, and members of Congress have complained that even classified briefings lacked hard evidence. Some of those killed in the strikes have later been identified as ordinary fishermen and other civilians with no known ties to the drug trade.

An investigation from the Washington Office on Latin America found in July that the military has relied on extraordinarily broad criteria to launch the strikes against anyone deemed to be "affiliated" with a secret list of designated terrorist groups. They do not require the commanders launching them to know the identities of those aboard a vessel or have any evidence that it is carrying drugs at all.

Even if the boats were engaged in drug trafficking as the administration claims, wrote Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, in a report released earlier this week, there are no “international legal rights to unilaterally use military force” to counter drug cartels or other organized crime groups that have not mounted any “armed attack” against the US.

The strikes, Saul added, were not a “last resort” or “necessary or proportionate” since the US had not tried to use non-lethal means like intercepting or boarding them before resorting to bombings.

Concurring with several other UN experts, he said that the strikes were "contrary to international law, violate the human right to life, and plausibly constitute crimes against humanity," including "murder."

Trump's comments on Tuesday seemed to underscore what Saul and others critical of the boat bombings have emphasized: that rather than using lethal force as a last resort to repel an immediate threat, his administration was simply killing suspects as an alternative to avoid a cumbersome legal process.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in a post on social media that Trump's comments were "worthy of the International Criminal Court."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested the administration’s calls to “dismantle” the ICC are in part out of concern that the court, which prosecutes war crimes and other international criminality, could be used to prosecute members of the Trump administration over the boat strikes.

Trump described the ICC as “anti-American” and “evil" during a speech at the UN General Assembly earlier on Tuesday, in which he also threatened to "annihilate" Iran and celebrated that he was claiming the "spoils" of war from Venezuela.

During that same speech, he also boasted that his administration “has carried out dozens of strikes on cartel drug boats, destroying 97% of the drugs coming into the ocean and sea," a claim that his administration has not provided evidence to substantiate.

An internal analysis by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), reported on in July by the Washington Post, found the opposite, in fact, stating that the strikes “failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States.”

As Trump heralded the boat strike campaign before the eyes of the world on Tuesday, a coalition of more than 70 lawmakers across the Americas called for the US to end what it said were "hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians."

The statement was signed by 15 Democratic members of the US Congress, including Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). It was also signed by lawmakers from Puerto Rico as well as 12 other countries across the Americas—Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.

"The identities of nearly all the victims remain publicly unknown, and many families lack effective or safe avenues to obtain information or redress. Coastal and fishing communities face fear and uncertainty as these attacks put lives and livelihoods at risk," the lawmakers wrote.

"The rights to life, due process, and protections against the arbitrary use of force are core principles of democratic rule of law that our countries have committed to uphold," they added. "Allegations of drug trafficking, however serious, do not circumvent or override these protections, nor do they justify lethal force against people who pose no imminent threat."