President Donald Trump announced Saturday that two survivors of Thursday’s military strike against a vessel, which the administration said was suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea, will be sent back to their countries of origin.
“The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution,” the president wrote on social media.
On Thursday, the military detained two men who survived a military strike against a group of alleged “narcoterrorists,” resulting in the U.S. holding prisoners for the first time since the Trump administration began targeting suspected drug traffickers on international waters.
Trump confirmed that two other individuals were killed in the strike.
The strike Thursday was the sixth publicly known strike by the U.S. military within the Caribbean Sea region near Venezuela, against vessels suspected of drug trafficking.
“It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route,” the president wrote in the post. “U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics.”
Trump and his administration have designated certain Latin American drug-trafficking groups as foreign terrorist organizations and have claimed that America is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with these groups. It was not clear why the military was repatriating the survivors instead of continuing to detain them.
Some legal experts have remained skeptical of the administration’s justification, arguing that drug trafficking traditionally falls under law enforcement purview and does not automatically qualify as an “armed attack.” The strikes have disrupted longstanding procedures in maritime drug-interdiction, by shifting to lethal force without trial.
