For the first time since President Donald Trump green-lit a string of lethal strikes on suspected Venezuelan cartel boats, survivors have emerged from the wreckage. Two men were pulled from the Caribbean after a U.S. operation blasted their vessel on Thursday. Until now, these missions were one-way trips to the bottom of the sea, with at least five prior attacks leaving more than two dozen dead. The Navy is now holding the rescued men aboard a U.S. warship, according to multiple officials familiar with the operation.
The latest strike, carried out in international waters, marks a turning point in what the White House has described as a campaign against “narcoterrorists” linked to Venezuela. Earlier operations ended with total destruction, but this time, there were survivors. The Pentagon has yet to publicly comment, but officials privately confirmed the rescue and said previous attacks killed at least 27 people, a number that has sparked growing scrutiny from lawmakers and human rights groups.
Lawmakers from both parties have demanded answers about the scope of the operation, including who was on these boats, how targets were chosen, and why the military rather than the Coast Guard is conducting maritime missions that end with explosions instead of arrests. Reports indicate that members of Congress have received little to no information from the administration about the strikes, which they say raises serious concerns about transparency and oversight.
The White House only fueled the debate further when Trump himself confirmed on Wednesday that he had authorized covert CIA activity in Venezuela. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” he told reporters. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States. And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.” The admission stunned national security officials, who said Trump’s comments could complicate intelligence operations and raise questions about whether the military strikes are tied to those covert missions.
Inside the Pentagon, officials have leaned on a legal memo asserting that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels. The framing attempts to justify the strikes under the laws of war, but critics say it doesn’t hold up. Human rights lawyers argue that suspected traffickers aren’t combatants and that destroying unflagged vessels in international waters without clear evidence of an immediate threat amounts to extrajudicial killing.
The presence of survivors now complicates that argument. If the U.S. is engaged in armed conflict, are these men prisoners of war or criminal suspects? If they are POWs, where are they being held, and under what legal authority? If they are suspects, why were earlier crews not captured and prosecuted? The administration has offered no answers. Meanwhile, military assets continue to pour into the Caribbean, including destroyers, F-35s, and a nuclear submarine, as Venezuela petitions the United Nations to declare the strikes illegal.
Politically, the timing could not be worse for the White House. Trump has publicly boasted about the missions, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vowed the administration has “every authorization needed.” But the emergence of survivors threatens to unravel the narrative of clean, surgical strikes. If these men start talking about who hired them, what they were carrying, or where they were headed, the story could quickly shift. For now, one thing is certain, this covert campaign just became a lot harder to explain.
