U.S. "Search and Rescue" Operations for Boat Strike Survivors Are a Macabre Joke
The responsibility and imperative to rescue shipwrecked sailors at sea is perhaps the oldest, cornerstone tenet of international maritime law. Search and rescue is a duty, one that no one can legally ignore, even in cases where obvious irony and contradiction can’t be avoided–like, say, when the shipwrecked survivors are there in the water because you just slammed a Hellfire missile into their vessel moments earlier in an attempt to kill them. Once those survivors are in the water, however, with no way to defend themselves or survive without assistance, you are obligated to perform search and rescue, even on people you’ve classified as enemy combatants. But in the Trump administration’s never-ending series of deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, performing “search and rescue” seems to be a purely theatrical exercise, with no actual intent to rescue anyone. The U.S. military seems to be operating with full intent to allow every one of its boat strike survivors to drown, sending out performative rescue missions far too late to have any probability of saving anyone. In doing so, we’re demonstrating just how little we value human lives, and the seeming preference that there be zero survivors.
The U.S. military’s philosophy toward survivors of its boat strike campaign has already seemingly morphed a few times since we began blowing up ships, unannounced, in the fall of 2025, completely changing how the military or police would typically be involved in drug enforcement operations. Infamously, in the very first strike on Sept. 2, 2025, the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) fired additional missiles upon survivors clinging to the boat wreckage, sparking debate about war crimes. Weeks later, on Oct. 16, the U.S. military carried out a strike on a “semi-submersible” in the Caribbean Sea that killed two people, but two other survivors were collected from the vessel and placed under arrest. On Truth Social, Donald Trump bragged that the “narcoterrorists” would face “detention and prosecution” when they were repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, but instead both were ultimately released without charges. It is perhaps this embarrassment that led the U.S. military to settle on an increasingly brutal, “no survivors” mindset, where they feint at performing search and rescue operations but have no real intent to save anyone. To date, combined search and rescue operations in the campaign (42 boat strikes, 144 killed) have resulted in zero survivors located through search and rescue missions.
Things are especially grim for the completely unknown people we’re killing in the region that SOUTHCOM refers to as the “Eastern Pacific,” a not-at-all infuriatingly vague term that totally obscures where these supposed drug smugglers are coming from or going to. New reporting from The Intercept, however, paints a picture of what the totally ineffectual, performative “search and rescue” missions look like when our missiles or cannons happen to leave people who are not yet dead, floating in the water.
The particular boat strike in question was actually a set of strikes against three boats in a small convoy, which happened on Dec. 30, 2025, as the world prepared to celebrate the New Year. After the first boat was hit by missiles, the occupants of the other two boats, totaling eight people, understandably abandoned their own boats and jumped into the frigid waters, roughly 400 nautical miles southwest of Ocos, Guatemala. The military then destroyed the remaining, uncrewed boats, effectively sentencing the men in the water to death. SOUTHCOM released its typical Twitter snuff video of the first boat and its human occupants being destroyed, saying of the survivors: “The remaining narco-terrorists abandoned the other two vessels, jumping overboard and distancing themselves before follow-on engagements sank their respective vessels. Following the engagements, USSOUTHCOM immediately notified @USCG to activate the Search and Rescue system.”
How long would you say a good response time would be, for those search and rescue professionals? Would you believe it took 45 hours for any representatives of the United States to show up at the site of the boat strikes? That is indeed what happened, and to the surprise of no one, they found no survivors anywhere in the area. The eight men who entered the water have subsequently been listed as deceased.
A second government official… questioned why, after months of attacks in the region, search and rescue assets weren’t pre-positioned closer to the Eastern Pacific.
“SOUTHCOM doesn’t want these people alive,” that official said.
— Nick Turse (@nickturse.bsky.social) Feb 17, 2026 at 12:10 PM
The negligence toward the responsibility for search and rescue begins with SOUTHCOM, which takes no active role in actually engaging in those operations–they merely fire the missiles or cannons that sink the ships, and then begin informing others about the survivors they’ve left behind in the wreckage. In this case, SOUTHCOM contacted the U.S. Coast Guard to pass off that responsibility. The Coast Guard, based in the U.S., began to contact other rescue coordination services and any ships in the area–only a single container ship ultimately responded, briefly searching the area roughly 17 hours after the strikes. More than 18 hours after the strikes, a Coast Guard C-130 search and rescue plane finally took off … from Sacramento, California, and it then flew nine hours to Liberia, Costa Rica for “refueling and crew rest.” Not until 7:33 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2026, did the plane actually leave Costa Rica and head toward the area where the boat strikes had occurred, arriving there nearly two full days after the missiles struck home. You can likely guess how little was waiting there for them to find.
We should note that even if search and rescue operations had been mounted immediately, from more nearby sources, the probability of successfully rescuing these men would have been extremely low. This is owed in part to the military’s decision to strike their boats when they’re hundreds of miles out to sea, in stormy, choppy waters that are apt to drown even strong swimmers within minutes. This is, to put it bluntly, where you would choose to strike when you want absolutely no one to survive. An operation that intended or desired to end up with survivors, meanwhile, would be conducted closer to land, with locally available planes or boat rescue teams standing by, ready to deploy.
“SOUTHCOM doesn’t want these people alive,” said an anonymous government official to The Intercept, stating the obvious elephant in the room. Military spokespeople, meanwhile, naturally clammed up, with the Coast Guard’s spokesperson declining to explain why planes aren’t pre-positioned for such missions, saying that “any questions regarding military operations including recent strikes should be referred directly to the Department of War.” SOUTHCOM, meanwhile, likewise declined to speak to The Intercept, saying only that “SOUTHCOM does not comment on speculative or unfounded reporting.”
133 people dead. No charges. No trials. No evidence. The Trump regime is blowing up boats in the Caribbean and calling it counterterrorism. That isn’t justice. It’s extrajudicial killing.
— Laguna Beach Democratic Club (@lagunabeachdems.bsky.social) Feb 14, 2026 at 1:31 PM
Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer and expert on the laws of war quoted in the same piece of reporting, makes plain that in cases like the Dec. 30, 2025 boat strikes, it appears that the military simply wants to avoid having to actually deal with any survivors it would theoretically collect. Human decency is, after all, such an incovenience.
“It does not appear as if they were eager to rescue additional survivors and then be faced with the question of ‘what do we do with them?'” Finucane said. “We’re going to hand off responsibility to the Coast Guard, which is going to arrive in a few days from California and look around and not find anything. So you can draw your own conclusions from that sequence.”
We can indeed. The total disregard for human life speaks for itself, and the pace of deaths has only continued to pick up after the arrival of new SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who authorized strikes killing two people on his very first day on the job, Feb. 5, hours after being sworn in at a ceremony at the Pentagon. Since Feb. 5, in the last two weeks, the U.S. has conducted six strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing 18 people–more than one per day. Our government hasn’t told us who a single one of those human beings was. Why would we deserve to know that?
Does any international court dare to try to hold the United States accountable for inauthentic search and rescue missions that are clearly designed to not produce any survivors? Or do we just throw this on the pile of human rights abuses that will be the Trump administration’s enduring legacy?