Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.
This is the third in a series of articles, “Try, Try Again?,” drawn from my new book—Great and Dangerous Offences: The Case for (and Against) Impeaching Trump a Third Time—due out in early 2027.
At the beginning of his national political career, Donald Trump famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose political support. In her dissent from the 2024 Supreme Court opinion granting Trump and his presidential successors unprecedented immunity for crimes committed while in office, Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed incredulously that should a president order “the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” he would nonetheless be “immune” from criminal prosecution. The first statement may remain an accurate description of the devotion of Trump’s most ardent admirers, and the second, incredibly, may now be an accurate statement of the law. Nonetheless, a president can still be impeached and removed for commanding an unlawful killing, as Trump has done in authorizing lethal, and illegal, strikes on boats merely suspected of carrying drugs. Murder is a “high crime.”
Video from Slate
In the fall of 2025, President Donald Trump authorized a series of military attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific alleged to be smuggling drugs. The first occurred on Sept. 2, 2025. The Pentagon called this and later attacks “kinetic strikes,” a euphemism for blowing up the boats and everything and everyone in them with bombs or missiles fired from aircraft, drones, or other U.S. military platforms. In neither this first attack nor in the many others that followed did U.S. authorities attempt to stop the boats, inspect their contents, or arrest and prosecute the supposed drug traffickers aboard them. In one notorious instance, several members of a boat’s crew survived the initial explosion and were clinging to the wreckage, but at the direct order of Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the military returned to the scene and killed them. As of Sept. 19 of this year, U.S. forces had hit 70 vessels and killed 234 people.
I have personal experience of anti–drug smuggling efforts in the Caribbean. For more than six years, I was an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. I prosecuted innumerable cases involving most of the ways human ingenuity can devise to move narcotics from South and Central America to the continental United States, including the most direct one—loading drugs on “go fast” boats and speeding across the ocean. When I first saw the black-and-white videos of Trump’s boat attacks, I recognized them immediately. In my days prosecuting drug smugglers, I had watched essentially the same grainy images shot by infrared cameras mounted on military or customs aircraft. With one key difference. Our videos were evidence. They ended with a capture, with crew members arrested, and with a prosecution in a court of law. Trump’s videos, gleefully released by his ghoulish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, end in a flash of light and either instant death or a slower, but usually no less fatal, struggle with the enveloping ocean. They are official snuff films.
What makes them even worse, if that’s possible, is that I never saw the infrared films of aerial surveillance unless the boat had been stopped and drugs found, making clear that the occupants were committing a crime. Because Trump’s uniformed henchmen blow up and sink the boat, usually with all its crew, there is rarely any proof that the boat was smuggling drugs in the first place. On the few occasions where U.S. forces have picked up survivors of the initial explosion, rather than arresting and attempting to prosecute them, the military simply put them ashore on foreign soil, where they would be in no position to dispute U.S. accounts of their supposedly nefarious activities. Hundreds of people have been executed on mere suspicion of crime, with no way even to verify whether the suspicion was accurate.
These movies, like the films of my younger days, are also evidence. Not of drug smuggling but of officially sanctioned murder.
To begin, law enforcement agents cannot use deadly force merely to apprehend someone suspected of crime. This is equally true whether the suspect immediately surrenders or chooses to flee. The police cannot shoot a fleeing suspect unless the suspect’s conduct threatens death or serious injury to the officer or others.
The same basic rule applies at sea: Military and law enforcement officers may not use lethal force to stop a vessel unless they have a reasonable belief that it poses a threat of violence to the pursuers. But there is no indication that any of the boats blown up by the U.S. were armed, carried men who were armed, or posed any threat to U.S. vessels.
Indeed, since the U.S. attacks seem to have been conducted using missiles fired from drones or other aircraft, in most cases those on the boats could neither have threatened U.S. forces nor surrendered to them because they would not even have known there were any U.S. vessels in the area before they were blown to pieces.
On U.S. soil, police officers who shoot fleeing, nonthreatening suspects can be charged with and convicted of murder or other forms of criminal homicide under both state and federal law. Federal law also penalizes as murder “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought” if it occurs within the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States” (which includes the high seas). Moreover, the Uniform Code of Military Justice provides that “[a]ny person subject to this chapter who, without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being, when such person—(1) has a premeditated design to kill; [or] (2) intends to kill … is guilty of murder.” U.S. experts have concluded that the strikes are unlawful, and a United Nations report concluded that the boat strikes are illegal and could constitute “crimes against humanity.”
In domestic U.S. law, police who shoot and kill civilians are rarely convicted of murder in large part because such shootings are almost invariably the product of split-second decisions by officers confronted with confused, chaotic, uncertain situations. By contrast, Trump’s boat strike killings are the product of a policy, adopted in advance, and coldly applied. Boats suspected of transporting narcotics are to be blown up and their occupants killed or at best wounded regardless of whether they could easily be apprehended and despite the fact that the encounters occur on the open ocean, where the boats present no imminent danger to U.S. vessels or anyone else.
The Trump administration has justified the boat killings publicly on various grounds, notably including the claim that these vessels were carrying fentanyl, which results in the death of many Americans. The obvious flaw in this bit of public relations flackery is that the main source of fentanyl or its components is Mexico, not the cocaine-producing South American countries from which the boats were sailing. Moreover, many of the first strikes were on boats from Venezuela, which produces little cocaine itself and which drug smugglers use “mostly as a transit hub to send drugs to Europe and Africa.”
Internally, the administration’s justification rests on a secret legal memorandum prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The OLC claims that blowing up boats without warning is justifiable because those on them are not merely drug traffickers but members of drug cartels that are actually nonstate-actor terrorist organizations engaged in armed conflict against the United States and attempting to destabilize the Western Hemisphere. Blowing up boats and crews suspected of carrying drugs is alleged to be acceptable because the sale of the drugs would finance the supposed narco-terrorist cartels.
The overwhelming consensus of the many experts on the law of war who have weighed in on the administration’s justifications for its killings is that they are flatly wrong or at best legally tenuous. At all events, they rely on factual assertions that are either facially untrue or impossible to verify in part because the military is either killing or immediately releasing any surviving witnesses.
Trump’s ongoing campaign of illegal and dishonorable military murders is, without doubt, a constitutionally valid ground for impeachment. Despite the self-serving opinion of the OLC, the killings violate civilian, military, and international law. Moreover, as the famous saying goes, this is worse than a crime: It’s a mistake.
First, as anyone who has done any international anti-narcotics work could have told Trump’s bloodthirsty minions (and probably did), blowing up some suspected drug boats and killing their captains and the moonlighting fishermen who crew them was never going to materially reduce the flow of drugs into the United States. It certainly was never going to affect the movement of fentanyl. Nor would sinking a few boats even materially slow cocaine imports. And as at least one recent study has shown, it hasn’t.
Second, if anything, just blowing people up impedes serious anti-narcotics work in the Caribbean basin. When you catch traffickers, you can search their boat, interrogate them, and not uncommonly secure information about and later testimony against those who hired them. Detonating a boat full of drug runners—if indeed they are drug runners—is a macabre version of taking a laptop full of intelligence and throwing it into the sea.
Third, regularizing illegal killing by the military sets a dark and dangerous precedent. Trump and Hegseth have now created a cadre of soldiers, sailors, and airmen—including very senior officers—with a demonstrated willingness to carry out lethal orders that on their face violate military and civilian law, as well as long-standing military ethical standards. The memo seeking to justify these crimes may, perhaps, insulate those who did the killing and maybe even those who gave the orders from court-martial justice. But they cannot change the fact that the orders should never have been followed nor the fact that the willingness to follow them creates a precedent for the next occasion when a president—whether Trump or a successor—orders the military to carry out unjustifiable killings.
Finally, the boat strikes expose the hypocrisy that permeates Trump’s entire approach to law. The first individual pardon of Trump’s second term went to Ross William Ulbricht, who was serving a life term for making millions running a “dark web” online market he christened “Silk Road” that used the anonymity of cryptocurrency to facilitate major drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes. In December 2025, Trump granted a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, who had been extradited from his home country and convicted in 2024 of facilitating a huge, yearslong drug-smuggling operation that corrupted his own government and moved some 400 tons of cocaine from Honduras to the U.S. In short, Trump giddily supports showy murders of mere boat drivers if suspected of trafficking drugs but happily pardons convicted villains who finance and manage drug trafficking at its highest levels.
In sum, the boat strikes amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” because they are crimes of the most serious sort known to human law, because they subvert the foreign policy interests of the United States, and because they are part of the larger pattern of subversion of the rule of law evident throughout Trump’s second term. By ordering the strikes Trump has acted in violation of his constitutional oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
There remains the question of whether an article of impeachment based on the boat strikes, however constitutionally sound, should be included in any third impeachment of Donald Trump. One reason for doing so—beyond the self-evident gravity of the crime—is that impeachment may be the only mode of holding him accountable. Because Trump is acting in his capacity as commander of the armed forces, the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision would make prosecuting him in criminal court for these deaths next to impossible. Moreover, the structure of legal justification erected by the Justice Department and the Pentagon for the killings will make securing accountability for those lower in the chain of command difficult. Thus, impeachment may be one of few available means of holding someone responsible for all the death.
All that said, cold considerations of realpolitik might counsel against including the boat strikes in a third Trump impeachment, particularly one that would be fully justifiable on many other grounds. The basic issue is that drug traffickers, particularly when labeled “narco-terrorists,” have no public constituency. A goodly fraction of the public thinks that the military should be used abroad against “drug cartels.” And while there may be increasing skepticism about particular aspects of the boat strikes (especially the lack of prior judicial authorization and the killing of survivors), one poll showed 48 percent approving military attacks on boats containing suspected drug smugglers.
My recommendation would be that a new Congress should carefully and publicly investigate the boat strike campaign but include charges related to it in an impeachment effort only if public opinion plainly turns against Trump on the issue and only as part of a comprehensive case that Trump is subverting the rule of law at home and abroad.