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center for constitutional rights
Trinidadians Sue US for Caribbean Boat Bombing That Killed Relatives 'In Cold Blood'
“People may not simply be gunned down by the government, and the Trump administration’s claims to the contrary risk making America a pariah state," said one attorney in the case.
Jan 27, 2026
Relatives of two Trinidadian men killed during the Trump administration's internationally condemned bombing spree against boats allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea filed a wrongful death lawsuit Tuesday against the United States.
Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, were killed in one of the at least 36 strikes the Trump administration has launched against civilian boats in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean since last September. According to the lawsuit and the Trump administration's own figures, at least 125 people have been killed in such strikes, which are part of the broader US military aggression targeting Venezuela.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts by lawyers from the ACLU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School on behalf of Joseph's mother Lenora Burnley and Samaroo's sister Sallycar Korasingh. The complaint alleges that the US violated the Death on the High Seas Act, which allows relatives to sue for wrongful deaths at sea, and the Alien Tort Statute, which empowers foreign citizens to seek legal redress in US federal courts.
According to the lawsuit:
On October 14, 2025, the United States government authorized and launched a missile strike against a boat carrying six people traveling from Venezuela to Trinidad. The strike killed all six, including Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian nationals who had been fishing in waters off the Venezuelan coast and working on farms in Venezuela, and who were returning to their homes in Las Cuevas, in nearby Trinidad and Tobago.
The October 14 attack was part of an unprecedented and manifestly unlawful US military campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean... The United States has not conducted these strikes pursuant to any congressional authorization. Instead, the government has acted unilaterally. And Trump administration officials, including President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have publicized videos of the boat strikes, boasting about and celebrating their own role in killing defenseless people.
"These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification," the lawsuit asserts. "Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command."
Burnley said in a statement announcing the lawsuit: "Chad was a loving and caring son who was always there for me, for his wife and children, and for our whole family. I miss him terribly. We all do."
“We know this lawsuit won’t bring Chad back to us, but we’re trusting God to carry us through this, and we hope that speaking out will help get us some truth and closure," she added.
Korasingh said, “Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again."
“Rishi was a hardworking man who paid his debt to society and was just trying to get back on his feet again and to make a decent living in Venezuela to help provide for his family," she added, referring to her brother's imprisonment for taking part in the 2009 murder of a street vendor. "If the US government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him. They must be held accountable.”
Trump officials have offered very little concrete evidence to support their claims that the targeted vessels were smuggling drugs. Critics allege that's why attorneys at the US Department of Defense reportedly inquired about whether two survivors of an October bombing in the Caribbean could be sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) maximum security prison in El Salvador, which has been described by rights groups as a "legal black hole."
The survivors were ultimately returned to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador. Some observers said their repatriation showed the Trump administration knew that trying the survivors in US courts would compel officials to explain their dubious legal justification for the attacks, which many experts say are illegal.
Trump officials also considered sending boat strike survivors to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but that would allow their lawyers to sue for habeas corpus—a right granted by the US Supreme Court in its 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision during the era of extrajudicial imprisonment and torture of terrorism suspects, as well as innocent men and boys, at the facility. The Trump administration has even revived the term “unlawful enemy combatant”—which was used by the Bush administration to categorize people caught up in the War on Terror in a way that skirts the law—to classify boat strike survivors.
The Trinidadian and Tobagonian government has also been criticized for hosting joint military exercises with the United States in the Caribbean Sea amid Trump's boat-bombing campaign.
ACLU senior counsel Brett Max Kaufman said Tuesday that “the Trump administration’s boat strikes are the heinous acts of people who claim they can abuse their power with impunity around the world."
“In seeking justice for the senseless killing of their loved ones, our clients are bravely demanding accountability for their devastating losses and standing up against the administration’s assault on the rule of law," he added.
CCR legal director Baher Azmy argued that “these are lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theater, which is why we need a court of law to proclaim what is true and constrain what is lawless."
"This is a critical step in ensuring accountability, while the individuals responsible may ultimately be answerable criminally for murder and war crimes," Azmy added.
Hafetz said that "using military force to kill Chad and Rishi violates the most elementary principles of international law."
“People may not simply be gunned down by the government," he stressed, "and the Trump administration’s claims to the contrary risk making America a pariah state.”
Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, contended that Trump's "lethal boat strikes violate our collective understanding of right and wrong."
“Rishi and Chad wanted only to get home safely to their loved ones; the unconscionable attack on their boat prevented them from doing so," Rossman added. "It is imperative that we hold this administration accountable, both for their families and for the rule of law itself.”
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'Cold-Blooded Murder': US Rights Coalition Sues Trump Over Unlawful Boat Strikes
If the Office of Legal Counsel opinion “seeks to dress up legalese in order to provide cover for the obvious illegality of these serial homicides, the public needs to see this analysis,” said one attorney.
Dec 09, 2025
A coalition of US rights organizations is suing the Trump administration to obtain its documentation outlining the legal justifications for its campaign of military strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday announced they had filed a complaint under the Freedom of Information Act demanding the release of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that provided the legal framework for the strikes, which many human rights organizations have decried as acts of murder.
The groups said that the Trump administration's rationales for the strikes deserve special scrutiny because their justification hinges on claims that the US is in an "armed conflict" with international drug cartels akin to past conflicts between the US government and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.
The groups argued there is simply no way that drug cartels can be classified under the same umbrella as terrorist organizations, given that the law regarding war with nonstate actors says that any organizations considered to be in armed conflict with the US must be an "organized armed group" that is structured like a conventional military and engaged in "protracted armed violence" with the US government.
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, accused the administration of warping the law beyond recognition in defense of its boat-bombing campaign.
"The Trump administration is displacing the fundamental mandates of international law with the phony wartime rhetoric of a basic autocrat," Azmy explained. "If the OLC opinion seeks to dress up legalese in order to provide cover for the obvious illegality of these serial homicides, the public needs to see this analysis and ultimately hold accountable all those who facilitate murder in the United States’ name."
Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the American public deserves to know "how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes."
Ify Chikezie, staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the Trump administration was making a mockery of government transparency by refusing to release its OLC documentation justifying the strikes, and demanded that "the courts must step in and order the administration to release these documents immediately."
The administration's boat-bombing spree, which so far has killed at least 87 people, has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks after it was revealed that the US military had launched a second strike during an operation on September 2 to kill two men who had survived an initial strike on their vessel.
While the September 2 strike has drawn the most attention, Daphne Eviatar, director for security and human rights for Amnesty International USA, argued last week that the entire boat-bombing campaign has been “illegal under both domestic and international law.”
“All of them constitute murder because none of the victims, whether or not they were smuggling illegal narcotics, posed an imminent threat to life,” she said. “Congress must take action now to stop the US military from murdering more people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.”
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Rights Group Pushes Delaware AG to Revoke Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's Corporate Charter
A Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer called on Kathy Jennings to "use her power to stop this dangerous entity that is masquerading as a charitable organization while furthering death and violence in Gaza."
Aug 13, 2025
A leading U.S. legal advocacy group on Wednesday urged Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings to pursue revoking the corporate charter of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid distribution points in the embattled Palestinian enclave have been the sites of near-daily massacres in which thousands of Palestinians have reportedly been killed or wounded.
Last week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) urgently requested a meeting with Jennings, a Democrat, whom the group asserted has a legal obligation to file suit in the state's Chancery Court to seek revocation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's (GHF) charter because the purported charity "is complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide."
CCR said Wednesday that Jennings "has neither responded" to the group's request "nor publicly addressed the serious claims raised against the Delaware-registered entity."
"GHF woefully fails to adhere to fundamental humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence and has proven to be an opportunistic and obsequious entity masquerading as a humanitarian organization," CCR asserted. "Since the start of its operations in late May, at least 1,400 Palestinians have died seeking aid, with at least 859 killed at or near GHF sites, which it operates in close coordination with the Israeli government and U.S. private military contractors."
One of those contractors, former U.S. Army Green Beret Col. Anthony Aguilar, quit his job and blew the whistle on what he said he saw while working at GHF aid sites.
"What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law," Aguilar told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman earlier this month. "This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth... The sites were designed to lure, bait aid, and kill."
Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers have admitted to receiving orders to open fire on Palestinian aid-seekers with live bullets and artillery rounds, even when the civilians posed no security threat.
"It is against this backdrop that [President Donald] Trump's State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development grant for GHF," CCR noted. "In so doing, the State Department exempted it from the audit usually required for new USAID grantees."
"It also waived mandatory counterterrorism and anti-fraud safeguards and overrode vetting mechanisms, including 58 internal objections to GHF's application," the group added. "The Center for Constitutional Rights has submitted a [Freedom of Information Act] request seeking information on the administration's funding of GHF."
CCR continued:
The letter to Jennings opens a new front in the effort to hold GHF accountable. The Center for Constitutional Rights letter provides extensive evidence that, far from alleviating suffering in Gaza, GHF is contributing to the forced displacement, illegal killing, and genocide of Palestinians, while serving as a fig leaf for Israel's continued denial of access to food and water. Given this, Jennings has not only the authority, but the obligation to investigate GHF to determine if it abused its charter by engaging in unlawful activity. She may then file suit with the Court of Chancery, which has the authority to revoke GHF's charter.
CCR's August 5 letter notes that Jennings has previously exercised such authority. In 2019, she filed suit to dissolve shell companies affiliated with former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Richard Gates after they pleaded guilty to money laundering and other crimes.
"Attorney General Jennings has the power to significantly change the course of history and save lives by taking action to dissolve GHF," said CCR attorney Adina Marx-Arpadi. "We call on her to use her power to stop this dangerous entity that is masquerading as a charitable organization while furthering death and violence in Gaza, and to do so without delay."
CCR's request follows a call earlier this month by a group of United Nations experts for the "immediate dismantling" of GHF, as well as "holding it and its executives accountable and allowing experienced and humanitarian actors from the U.N. and civil society alike to take back the reins of managing and distributing lifesaving aid."
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