Family members of two Trinidadians killed in one of Hegseth’s boat strikes have filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration, calling the attack a war crime and part of an “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful U.S. military campaign.” According to AP, the complaint will test the legal justification of the Trump administration attacks; government officials have defended them as necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the United States, but many legal experts say they amount to a brazen violation of the laws of armed conflict.
“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification. Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit was filed by the mother of Chad Joseph and the sister of Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian nationals who were among six people killed in an October 14 missile strike on a boat traveling from Venezuela to Trinidad. The men were not members of any drug cartel, the lawsuit says, but had instead been fishing in the waters off the Venezuelan coast and were returning to their homes in Trinidad and Tobago.
