Who is the US killing in its boat attacks? Hegseth won't say, and lawmakers want answers.

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The Trump administration's deadly strikes on boats off the coasts of South America – and the release of multiple survivors back to their home countries – have raised questions about who the U.S. killed and what evidence they had the vessels were transporting drugs.

Trump administration officials say the strikes are part of a sweeping counternarcotics operation. Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth and other officials have said U.S. intelligence determined that the boats carried drugs and passengers on them were parties to criminal trafficking of illegal substances to the U.S.

To date, however, the Defense Department has provided no evidence. As concerns boil over from some lawmakers that these strikes are illegal, Trump administration officials have opted to withhold details, holding a memo justifying the military action close to their chest.

The answers to what officials know and how they know it are there, some have indicated, but the information is not yet accessible to anyone but Republican Senate insiders.

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The repatriated survivors raised a new legal question: if the U.S. had enough evidence to attack their boat, why wasn't that evidence sufficient to try them in an American court?

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Many of the targeted boats departed from Venezuela, and the strikes appear to be tied to a campaign led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force President Nicolás Maduro, the country's left-wing strongman, from power. President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that the next strikes could be on land – although he denied a Wall Street Journal report on Oct. 31 that the U.S. had a ready-to-go list of targets in Venezuela.

The legal memo providing the military's justification for the strikes was reportedly drawn up by the Justice Department – not the Pentagon. Taking that approach is something the CIA calls a "golden shield" within the CIA, Jack Landman Goldsmith, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a commentary article. The document protects officials operating under it from criminal prosecution down the line, he wrote.

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"The Pentagon pulled its lawyers – the exact people who would supply a legal justification for these strikes – from the briefing with no notice," Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democrat representing Massachusetts, said on X.

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The strikes also have not targeted the central nodes of the networks that bring drugs into the U.S. Most illegal shipments of fentanyl, one of the deadliest contributors to drug overdoses in the U.S., enter the U.S. by land, from Mexico.

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