Families of two men killed in Trump’s military boat strikes sue US government | Trump administration
Civil rights lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government on Tuesday on behalf of the families of two men from a small Trinidad fishing village who were killed in a U.S. military airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on Oct. 14.
The lawsuit, previously shared with the Guardian, states that Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, from Las Cuevas, Trinidad, were returning to Trinidad from Venezuela when they and four others were killed on strike. It was the fifth attack announced by the White House as part of Donald Trump’s campaign against small fast boats that the administration claims are linked to cartels and gangs.
The lawsuit was filed four days after the administration announced Friday the 36th such boat attack in the Eastern Pacific. The number of deaths so far in boat attacks is at least 117.
The lawsuit stated that the strikes were illegal. “There is no reasonable legal justification for these premeditated and premeditated murders,” the lawsuit said. “So these were just murders, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by officers up the chain of command.” Legal experts said attacks on civilians on boats away from the United States were a violation of domestic and international law. The Trump administration argues they are legal under a classified opinion written by the justice department that argues the United States is in an armed conflict with the cartels and that the laws of war apply to the attacks.
The lawsuit over the October attack was filed in federal district court in Massachusetts under the Admiralty Act, which deals with maritime disputes and violations, and was filed by Chad’s mother, Lenore Burnley, and Samaroo’s sister, Sallycar Korasingh. He cites the Alien Torts Act and the Death on the High Seas Act, which allow foreign nationals to file lawsuits in U.S. courts in certain circumstances.
In a separate case in December, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian citizen killed in another attack, filed a human rights complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States.
But the lawsuit filed Tuesday is the first federal lawsuit filed regarding the attacks. Families of those killed are represented by attorneys from the ACLU, Seton Hall University and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall law school said the case is the first of its kind because the United States has never conducted a bombing campaign of this kind. “This is uncharted waters. Never before in the history of the country has the government had this kind of authority,” he said in an interview. “This is a clear example of illegal killings by the United States. The United States assumes the privilege of killing the victims in international waters.”
In a press release, Korasingh is quoted as saying: “If the US government believed Rishi did something wrong, it should have arrested, charged and detained him, not killed him.”
Little is known about the attack in which Samaroo and Joseph were killed. That day, Trump released a video showing a small open-boat boat floating on the water but not moving suddenly burst into flames. “Under the command of my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning the Minister of War ordered a lethal kinetic attack on a ship affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO),” he wrote on social media.
Trump said “six male narcoterrorists on board were killed in the attack” but did not say which group authorities believed they were affiliated with and did not say whether authorities believed there were drugs or weapons on the ship.
