House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) used the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s campaign of lethal strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels to renew his demand for accountability from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, writing in a post on X Wednesday that the operation has killed more than 200 people without the administration ever producing evidence to justify the killings.
“One year ago today, Donald Trump began an unauthorized campaign of lethal military strikes on alleged drug boats,” Jeffries wrote. “More than 200 people are now dead. The administration still has not provided evidence to justify these extrajudicial killings. America needs a serious counter-narcotics strategy that targets drugs like fentanyl, disrupts drug trafficking and reduces demand in our communities. Pete Hegseth will be held accountable for these lawless boat bombings.”
Jeffries published the statement on X at 12:01 p.m. on Tuesday, September 2, 2026, coinciding exactly with the one-year mark of the first strike in the campaign.
Background: One Year Of Strikes
The operation Jeffries referenced began on September 1 or 2, 2025, when the U.S. military carried out its first strike on a vessel departing from Venezuela, killing all 11 people aboard. Trump personally announced the strike and released video of the attack, describing it as the opening act of a broader campaign against cartels and “narco-terrorist” organizations operating in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. In the year since, the campaign — carried out primarily under U.S. Southern Command and known in Pentagon parlance as Operation Southern Spear — has expanded from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast into the Eastern Pacific, with the deadliest single month, October 2025, seeing 45 people killed.
By September 2, 2026, an analysis published by The Intercept put the death toll at a minimum of 227 people killed across roughly 65 strikes, while other outlets, including Al Jazeera, have placed the figure at more than 200 to 220. The Trump administration has consistently declined to release the identities of those killed or the intelligence used to designate the vessels as trafficking narcotics on behalf of organizations it has labeled terrorist groups.
The legality of the strikes has faced sustained scrutiny from lawmakers, legal scholars and human rights organizations since a Washington Post report last December revealed that Hegseth had ordered a follow-on, or “double-tap,” strike on September 2, 2025, on survivors clinging to the wreckage of an earlier attack. The revelation prompted bipartisan calls for investigations, with the Republican and Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees at the time vowing to examine whether the follow-on strike violated the laws of war.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have since filed suit against the administration over its refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request seeking a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion that reportedly attempted to justify the strikes as legitimate military action rather than law enforcement operations. “For a year now, the Trump administration has engaged in a terrifying, lawless killing campaign at sea and has yet to provide the public with anything beyond the most threadbare justifications,” ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Jeff Stein said in a statement released the night before the anniversary.
Admiral Alvin Holsey, who led U.S. Southern Command when the campaign began, retired from his post late last year amid reported skepticism within the military about the legal basis for the operations. Frank Bradley, who as a rear admiral oversaw the September 2025 strikes, was later promoted to lead Special Operations Command, while Francis Donovan took over as SOUTHCOM commander.
Smith Statement On The Anniversary
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) also marked the anniversary on Wednesday, releasing a statement that echoed Jeffries’ demand for transparency while placing additional emphasis on the operation’s effectiveness. “It has been one year since President Trump and his administration launched their unauthorized campaign of lethal U.S. military strikes on boats alleged to be linked to what the administration refers to as ‘designated terrorist organizations’ in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Smith said. “Congress and the American people have yet to see any evidence to support the president’s unilateral determinations that these vessels, or the activities of those on board, warrant lethal military force rather than law enforcement-led interdiction.”
Smith noted that more than 60 strikes have killed more than 200 people, and pointed to one strike in which survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat were killed in a follow-on attack — a reference to the September 2, 2025, incident attributed to Hegseth’s order. He also cited Holsey’s resignation as evidence of internal unease over the campaign’s legal footing.
Smith went further than Jeffries in challenging the operation’s underlying rationale, arguing that the drugs most commonly smuggled aboard the small vessels being targeted are not the ones driving the administration’s stated justification for the strikes. “It remains unclear whether these operations have made any real difference in stopping illegal drugs from reaching the United States,” Smith said. “This is especially true for fentanyl, which President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have repeatedly claimed is the reason for these extrajudicial killings even though we know that it is cocaine — not fentanyl — that is typically shipped via small boats from South America.”
Smith also criticized the Pentagon’s refusal to disclose the operation’s costs. “Never before in my over 20 years on this committee have I seen such a staggering lack of transparency on behalf of an administration and DoD to meaningfully inform Congress of the use of lethal military force,” he said, adding that while illegal narcotics pose “a serious risk to the health and well-being of Americans that demands government action,” that action “should be taken legally with law enforcement in the lead.” He closed by drawing a comparison to prior anti-drug campaigns: “Much as the previous wars on drugs failed to deliver lasting results, we can’t bomb our way out of the drug crisis now.”
A Pattern Of Criticism From Jeffries
Wednesday’s post continued a line of criticism Jeffries has sustained since the double-tap strike revelation became public in late November 2025. At a press conference that December, Jeffries called Hegseth “the most unqualified secretary of Defense in American history” and said he had called for Hegseth’s removal “months ago.” He argued at the time that the strike amounted to “real evidence that extrajudicial killings are taking place,” adding that it represented “the stain on America’s leadership in the free world, which is why our international standing is plummeting.”
Jeffries has also pressed for public release of unedited strike footage, telling reporters in December that Americans deserved “an opportunity to determine for themselves whether that strike killing people who were shipwrecked, and by all accounts were not presenting any threat to American military personnel, whether that kind of seemingly extrajudicial killing is consistent with American values.” He joined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats in a formal letter to Hegseth demanding the video’s release.
Despite the sustained criticism, Jeffries has signaled that Democrats are unlikely to pursue impeachment proceedings against Hegseth given Republican control of both chambers of Congress. “Republicans will never allow articles of impeachment to be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we know that’s the case,” Jeffries said in December, adding that “Donald Trump will order them not to do it.” He has instead pointed to the possibility of legal consequences after Trump leaves office, noting that “the statute of limitations for any crimes being committed now [is] five years.”
Continued Fallout
Other Democrats echoed Jeffries and Smith on the anniversary. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), an Iraq War veteran, noted that the most recent strike had come just four days before the anniversary and said the administration “has never once come to Congress to justify any of it,” warning that “this cannot become the way our country goes to war.” Gallego also linked the campaign to the broader financial and human costs of the Trump administration’s six-month military conflict with Iran, saying, “I fought in Iraq. I know what these wars cost, and I know who pays them.”
The White House has consistently defended the strikes as a necessary escalation against traffickers, with officials arguing that decades of interdiction-based strategy failed to curb the flow of narcotics into the United States. Trump has described the country as being in an “armed conflict” with cartel-linked traffickers. Critics, including legal specialists cited by The Intercept, have disputed that framing directly. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer specializing in the laws of war, said of the strikes: “There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder.”
As the anniversary passed without a change in policy, families in Venezuela and Colombia continued to press for information about relatives who went missing after being killed in the strikes, with some alleging their loved ones were fishermen rather than traffickers. The administration has not released the identities of most of those killed, leaving the full scope of the campaign’s human toll, and its legal justification, unresolved one year after it began.