Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA) used five minutes of his allotted questioning time at the House Armed Services Committee’s April 29, 2026 budget hearing to press Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly on what he called potentially unlawful drone strikes on Ecuadorian fishing vessels operating in international waters — invoking the Department of Defense’s own Law of War Manual, survivor testimony reported by Drop Site News, and the complete absence of evidence that the crews were engaged in drug trafficking. “With each of these extrajudicial killings, the administration is pirating American values,” Keating said. “We will continue to investigate this.”
Keating’s exchange with Hegseth was among the most charged moments of the two-day hearing, which was nominally focused on the administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request. Hegseth responded to Keating’s detailed account of the Don Maca fishing boat strike by calling it “an incredible array of false accusations.” Keating yielded back his time without waiting for Hegseth to finish. The confrontation was later referenced by Drop Site News on X, whose investigation into U.S. drone strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats Keating had drawn on directly in his questioning.
What Keating Told the Committee
Keating opened by citing the Department of Defense Law of War Manual, which specifies that “any order to kill shipwrecked persons is an illegal order” and would constitute a war crime — not as a general principle, Keating noted, but as a “specific example” in the manual itself. He then walked the committee through the account of the Don Maca, a 35-ton Ecuadorian fishing vessel operating approximately 200 nautical miles off the Galápagos Islands on March 26, 2026, whose crew had finished a day of albacore and swordfish fishing when it was struck without warning by U.S. forces.
“It was hit once, then it was hit again. Not a warning shot, not an interdiction, two drone strikes,” Keating said. He described the aftermath as reported by survivors: U.S. forces handcuffed the crew at gunpoint, placed black hoods over their heads, seized and scrubbed their devices, held them for days, and ultimately released them when no evidence of narcotics or criminal activity was found. “To recap,” Keating said, “we struck a vessel. We struck it again, set fire to it as it was sinking, and as public reports say, even drank their beer. We detained the survivors, and then we let them go. This should be eye-opening.”
He also told the committee he had received classified information on a prior September 2, 2025 strike — in which two survivors in the water were killed in a follow-on strike — and that the classified justification was “the most convoluted bullshit I have ever heard in my life. This should be public. This is our honor. This is what makes America a difference maker.”
The Drop Site News Investigation
The survivor accounts Keating referenced in his questioning were drawn in significant part from an April 21, 2026 investigation by reporter Camila Lourdes Galarza for Drop Site News, titled “Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege U.S. Forces Kidnapped and Tortured Them.” The investigation documented testimony from 36 survivors of two Pacific attacks — those aboard the Don Maca and the La Negra Francisca Duarte II — who alleged they were struck by drones, detained by U.S.-flagged patrol vessels bearing the word “Spear” on the hull, hooded, handcuffed, held on a metal deck for over 24 hours in temperatures that blistered their skin, denied food, given only one bottle of water, denied medical attention despite severe injuries, and transported to El Salvador before being returned to Ecuador. No drugs or illicit materials were found aboard any of the three boats documented in the investigation.
Captain Hernán Flores of the La Negra Francisca Duarte II told Drop Site News: “A lot of us had wounds all over our bodies from the explosion. One young man was bleeding so much he filled the floor of our lifeboat with blood. The drone had flown through our cabin window, torn my nephew’s foot so bad you could see flesh and bone, and made the boat’s roof cave in on the back of my neck. My ears still hurt. I think that’s it for me. I’m done with fishing. Going back out there is impossible. I thought they were going to kill us.” Survivor Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, 54, told the newspaper Primicias: “They treated us like animals.”
A separate vessel, the La Fiorella, disappeared on January 20, 2026. The last communication from its captain, Carlos Valencia Mero, was a call to his wife saying an “American aircraft, two drones, and a blue patrol ship” had been circling the boat. The vessel had been cleared by Ecuadorian coast guard personnel at a checkpoint near the Galápagos just hours before it vanished. Eight crew members have not been seen since. The UN Office on Forced Disappearances formally demanded the Ecuadorian government investigate the disappearances.
Operation Southern Spear: What It Is and What It Has Done
The strikes Keating challenged are part of Operation Southern Spear, a U.S. military campaign of lethal maritime strikes against vessels the Trump administration alleges are operated by narcoterrorists or cartel members in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, launched in September 2025. As of late April 2026, the operation had killed at least 185 people in at least 47 strikes on 48 vessels, according to reporting by the Washington Office on Latin America. The Trump administration has not publicly released evidence establishing that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs in any of the strikes. Before Hegseth’s Pentagon began conducting the strikes, drug trafficking in international waters was treated as a criminal law enforcement matter — the U.S. Coast Guard would intercept suspect vessels, arrest suspects, and bring them to trial.
The September 2, 2025 strike — which Keating addressed through classified briefings — is the most legally contested. As reported by TIME, The Washington Post, and CNN, the U.S. military struck a suspected drug boat, killing most of those aboard, and then fired a second missile at two survivors struggling in the water. Multiple anonymous sources told the Washington Post that Hegseth had given a verbal directive that “the order was to kill everybody.” Hegseth and Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley — the operational commander who directed the strike and was subsequently promoted — have both denied that any such order was given. House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) closed the committee’s inquiry after a classified briefing, saying he was satisfied the strike was legal. Senate Democrats have not accepted that conclusion.
The Legal Framework Keating Is Invoking
Keating’s invocation of the DOD Law of War Manual is precise. The manual explicitly states that killing shipwrecked persons — defined as those rendered incapable of resistance by the destruction of their vessel — is an unlawful order constituting a war crime under the laws of armed conflict. As analyzed by legal scholars at Just Security, the duty to refuse clearly unlawful orders applies regardless of whether the situation constitutes a formal armed conflict — meaning even if the administration’s claim that it is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels is accepted, the order to kill survivors in the water would still be unlawful. Reps. Ted Lieu and Jamie Raskin separately demanded a DOJ investigation into Hegseth, writing in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that “outside of war, the killing of unarmed, helpless men clinging to wreckage in open water is simply murder” under federal law.
The Don Maca incident that Keating described at the April 29 hearing introduces a separate but related legal concern: the strikes on a fishing vessel whose crew was cleared by Ecuadorian coast guard, found to have no drugs or illicit materials after days of detention, and then released — with its boat destroyed and its crew hooded, handcuffed, and transported without charges to El Salvador. Fernando Bastias Robayo, a lawyer with the Human Rights Council representing survivors, has argued the incident involved enforced disappearance and psychological torture under international law. The Ecuadorian government of President Daniel Noboa — a close ally of the Trump administration — has declined to publicly contest the U.S. account of the strikes.
Hegseth’s Response and What Comes Next
Hegseth’s response to Keating’s five-minute account was brief and dismissive. “It’s an incredible array of false accusations!” he said, as Keating was already yielding back his time. The Pentagon has maintained throughout the Southern Spear campaign that all targeted vessels were operated by designated terrorist organizations or narcoterrorists, that strikes were conducted lawfully and within appropriate rules of engagement, and that the administration retains the legal authority to conduct lethal strikes against drug traffickers threatening the United States. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated after the September 2 strike that Hegseth “authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes” and that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law.”
Keating told the committee he intends to keep pushing. “We will continue to investigate this. We will. It’ll come forward in the future.” The Drop Site News investigation that surfaced the Don Maca survivors’ accounts has now entered the formal congressional record through Keating’s questioning — placing the survivor testimony, the absence of drug evidence, and the DOD’s own Law of War Manual language directly in front of the Secretary of Defense and into a House Armed Services Committee hearing transcript. Whether that produces a formal investigation, further classified briefings, or a demand for video footage of the Don Maca strike — as some lawmakers have sought for the September 2 strike — will be among the oversight questions that define the committee’s posture on Operation Southern Spear in the weeks ahead.