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It was the eighth known strike, and the first outside the Caribbean, in the Trump administration’s campaign against what it says are boats carrying drugs bound for the United States.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, right, listen during a meeting with President Donald Trump, in foreground left, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Monday, October 20, 2025, in Washington. AP Photo/Evan Vucci
By Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage, New York Times Service
October 22, 2025 | 4:33 PM
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. military attacked another vessel that the government suspected was carrying drugs, but for the first time struck a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia rather than in the Caribbean Sea, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
The strike, late Tuesday, killed two or three people on the boat, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
This was the eighth known strike that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted since Sept. 2, when the military, on President Donald Trump’s orders, began killing people aboard boats believed to be smuggling drugs as if they were enemy combatants in a war rather than criminal suspects.
The administration has previously acknowledged seven strikes, which it said have killed 32 people. It has not yet announced the latest strike, which was reported earlier by CBS News.
The Trump administration’s policy of attacking suspected drug runners began with a focus on Venezuela. Officials are also weighing whether to intensify an effort to remove Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020 and whom the Trump team calls a cartel leader.
But in the interim, the boat attacks have increasingly encompassed Colombia, which is a far greater source of narcotics smuggled to the United States than Venezuela. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has said several strikes had killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Trump has said he was cutting off foreign aid to Colombia in response.
The Trump administration has said that each of the seven previous attacks were in international waters and that the passengers were members of drug cartels that the State Department had designated terrorist organizations.
Many of those designations, which the administration itself made in the months leading up to the campaign, are contested because drug cartels are motivated by the pursuit of illicit profits, while terrorists, by definition, are motivated by religious or ideological goals.
The administration has also said intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers’ identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence.
U.S. officials on Wednesday did not immediately identify any specific group linked to the boat it struck off the Colombian coast.