Families of Boat Strike Victims Sue U.S. for “Manifestly Unlawful” Killings

Family members of Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41 — two Trinidadian men killed in a U.S. boat strike on October 14, 2025 — are suing the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and Seton Hall Law School professor Jonathan Hafetz called the entire campaign of attacks in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful” in a complaint filed on Tuesday.

The suit will be brought in U.S. federal admiralty court under the Death on the High Seas Act, a congressional statute that covers wrongful maritime deaths. The plaintiffs are also bringing claims for extrajudicial killing under the Alien Tort Statute, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over violations of the law of nations, including extrajudicial killing. Another federal statute, the Suits in Admiralty Act, waives U.S. sovereign immunity — which ordinarily protects the federal government from being sued — over both claims.

“This allows the families of victims to bring a claim for wrongful or negligent death committed on the high seas. And in our case, this is murder,” Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, told The Intercept. “It was a murder. These were both homicides. Both men were killed without any due process.”

A total of six civilians were reportedly killed in the October 14 strike on a boat in the Caribbean. “Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Trump announced on Truth Social that same day. “The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike.”

The Intercept spoke with Lenore Burnley, Joseph’s mother, shortly after she learned her son had been killed. “I don’t want to believe it. Not my child,” she said. “Somebody called us. They said he was on the boat.” Burnley said she had nothing to say to Trump. “I put it in God’s hands,” she told The Intercept at the time.

Joseph and Samaroo were returning from Venezuela to their homes in Las Cuevas, Trinidad, on October 14. Joseph, who had a wife and three children, often traveled to Venezuela to fish and do farmwork. Two days before he was killed, Joseph called his wife to let her know that he had found a boat ride home from Venezuela and would see her soon.

Samaroo was also working on a farm in Venezuela, caring for goats and cows and making cheese. On October 12, he told his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, that he was coming home to take care of his mother, who had fallen ill.

“Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again,” said Korasingh. “If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him. They must be held accountable.”

Burnley hoped that the lawsuit would offer her family answers. “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,” she said. “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.”

The U.S. military has carried out 36 known attacks, destroying 37 boats, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 126 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on January 23, killing two people and leaving one survivor. The Coast Guard was unsuccessful in locating the shipwrecked man and called off the search on January 25. He is now presumed dead. 

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes, with a secret list of the DTOs attached. “Whatever that secret memorandum states, it cannot render the patently illegal killings lawful,” reads the complaint, which was shared with The Intercept prior to publication.

“Using military force to kill Chad and Rishi violates the most elementary principles of international law,” said Hafetz, the Seton Hall Law School professor. “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.”

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed two survivors of the initial boat attack on September 2 in a follow-up strike. The two survivors clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked by the U.S. military for roughly 45 minutes before Adm. Frank Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a follow-up strike that killed the shipwrecked men.

U.S. Southern Command has been incapable of keeping an accurate count of the attacks on boats and the number of people killed in the strikes. The command is also unable to cope with civilian harm reports stemming from recent operations, prompting the Pentagon to begin accepting casualty claims directly.

Trinidadian Foreign Minister Sean Sobers told a local news outlet after the October 14 strike that “the government has no information linking Joseph or Samaroo to illegal activities.”

The complaint notes that under the laws of war or international humanitarian law, there is no actual armed conflict that could justify the lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the October 14 strike. And, as a result, the campaign violates international laws prohibiting extrajudicial killings and federal law prohibiting murder.

The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit.

“It’s a fairly straightforward application of the Death and the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute. Summary execution has long been recognized as a violation of the law of nations — customary international law — and the Alien Tort Statute Act recognizes a cause of action based on that because we’ve got the waiver of the U.S. government’s sovereign immunity,” the ACLU’s Watt explained. “The U.S. government doesn’t have any defenses on the merits of the case. There is no question it was a summary execution. There is a video and a confession by President Trump. He essentially says, ‘We murdered these guys.’”