On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military blew up a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea. Eleven men were on it.
Two of them lived through it. They pulled themselves onto a piece of the overturned hull and floated there for about 45 minutes, holding on, with nowhere to go.
Then a second missile killed them.
That was the first strike. One year later, The Intercept reports that the campaign has never stopped. The U.S. has carried out more than 65 attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 227 people are dead. The most recent strike, on August 25, killed four.
Congress never voted to authorize any of it.
Congress did get the chance to stop it. Five weeks in, the Senate held that vote. Fifty Republicans voted no.
We do not know who most of these people were
Start with the part that should end the argument on its own.
Of the 227 people killed, 26 have been identified by name. That number comes from Airwars, a U.K.-based group that monitors conflicts around the world and worked with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism to put names to the dead. The U.S. government has not named a single victim.
Every person identified so far appears to be a man. The ones whose ages are known were between 24 and 46. Of the 41 identified by nationality, 18 were Venezuelan, 13 Mexican, three Colombian, three Ecuadorian, two from Trinidad and Tobago, and two from Saint Lucia.
Reporters who managed to put names to some of them found a bus driver. A mototaxi driver. Men who fished or worked in the seafood trade. A futsal player. They came from poor towns, and whatever connection they had to the drug trade was at the very bottom of it.
Families in six countries still do not know whether the men they are missing were on one of those boats.
What the Senate actually voted on
On September 18, 2025 — sixteen days after the first strike — Senators Adam Schiff and Tim Kaine introduced Senate Joint Resolution 83.
It is a short document, and it is not complicated. It says Congress has the sole power to declare war. It says Congress has not declared war on, or authorized force against, any group the administration newly labeled a terrorist organization, any country those groups operate in, or "any non-state organization engaged in the promotion, trafficking, and distribution of illegal drugs and other related activities." It says calling a group a terrorist organization does not by itself give a president permission to kill its members. And it says none of those groups have attacked the United States.
What it comes down to is simple. If you want to shoot at people, come ask Congress first.
The resolution was parked in the Foreign Relations Committee, which is where things go to be ignored. So on October 8, 2025, the Senate held a vote on whether to pull it out of committee so the full chamber could debate it at all.
Not a vote to end the strikes. A vote on whether senators would be permitted to discuss ending the strikes.
Fifty Republicans voted no. Only two voted yes: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Ted Cruz did not vote. One Democrat, John Fetterman, voted with the Republicans.
These are the fourteen Republican senators we track who voted to keep the question off the Senate floor:
- Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
- Alaska — Dan Sullivan
- Arkansas — Tom Cotton
- Florida — Ashley Moody
- Idaho — Jim Risch
- Kansas — Roger Marshall
- Maine — Susan Collins
- Mississippi — Cindy Hyde-Smith
- Nebraska — Pete Ricketts
- Ohio — Jon Husted
- South Dakota — Mike Rounds
- Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
- West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito
Two of them switching sides would have carried it.
Then they did it again. And again. And again.
October was not a one-time thing. The Senate came back to this three more times, and the same names kept showing up on the same side.
November 6, 2025. A second resolution, this one specifically about Venezuela. Same procedure, same result: rejected, 49 to 51. Again, the only two Republicans voting yes were Murkowski and Paul.
January 8, 2026. Something changed. Five Republicans crossed over and the motion passed, 52 to 47. For six days it looked like the Senate might actually take a position.
January 14, 2026. It didn't. A procedural objection was raised — a challenge to whether the resolution even qualified for the fast track that guarantees it a floor vote. It is a way to kill a measure without anyone having to say out loud whether the killings should stop. Two of the five Republicans who had just voted yes, Josh Hawley and Todd Young, switched back. The chamber split 50 to 50, and Vice President JD Vance came over to break the tie in favor of shutting it down.
Thirteen of the fourteen senators listed above voted to block every one of those resolutions. All four times. Susan Collins is the only one who broke ranks, and only in January — on the October and November resolutions she voted with the rest of them.
If this pattern feels familiar, it should. It is the same thirteen senators who, on July 30, 2026, voted to keep the Senate from debating an end to the Iran war — the thirteenth time that chamber had taken up the question. And Jim Risch chairs the committee where all of these resolutions were buried in the first place. He is the one who decides whether a subject gets a public hearing, and on Trump's Iran war he decided it wouldn't.
The legal case for all this is classified
Here is the reasoning the administration is operating on, according to the classified Justice Department opinion The Intercept describes: the drugs on the boats are a legitimate military target, because selling them makes money for cartels, and the cartels are supposedly in an armed conflict with the United States. Attached to that memo is a secret list of the groups it applies to.
The list is secret. The memo is secret. The Pentagon has withheld both from Congress, along with the basic facts about who has been killed.
A government official who has read the opinion called it "flimsy yet expansive," and said that even under its own generous terms, the U.S. has killed people it did not cover.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in the laws of war, put it more bluntly:
"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."
U.S. Southern Command disagrees. Its spokesman, Steven McLoud, said every operation is "planned and executed within the full bounds of our legal framework, ensuring that every target meets the legal criteria established by our Office of Legal Counsel." That is the same Office of Legal Counsel whose opinion nobody outside the executive branch is allowed to read.
Senator Tim Kaine, who sits on both the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, reviewed the highly classified material and wrote to the president in August. His conclusion was that the "available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking."
The House looked into it for eleven days
The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.
When the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered the crew to "kill everybody," the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee promised a full accounting. Mike Rogers of Alabama and his ranking Democrat put out a joint statement about "rigorous oversight" and "bipartisan action."
Eleven days later, after one classified briefing, he told reporters "it's done" and closed the inquiry. The video the committee watched has still never been released.
The one piece of real pressure Congress has managed in a year is buried in this year's defense policy bill: it holds back 25 percent of the travel money for the Defense Secretary's office until the Pentagon turns over the overdue reports and the unedited strike footage lawmakers have been asking for.
A quarter of a travel budget. That is what a year of accountability looks like.
What the record shows
In the twelve months since the first strike, the U.S. military has killed 227 people at sea in a campaign Congress never authorized, and has publicly named none of them. Twenty-six were identified by outside journalists; the dead include a bus driver, a mototaxi driver and men who worked in fishing. The Senate voted four times on whether to make the president come to Congress first, and fourteen Republican senators we track voted no the first time — thirteen of them voted no every time. That first vote, five weeks into the killings, came down to two senators.
Source
Nick Turse, "The U.S. Has Killed 227 Civilians in Boat Strikes During 'A Year of Murders'", The Intercept, September 2, 2026. Lead image: a U.S. Southern Command social media post from August 25, 2026, showing a vessel in the Caribbean moments before a U.S. strike killed four people. Screenshot: @Southcom on X, via The Intercept.
