After killing nearly 200 people over nine months, the Trump administration’s campaign of attacks on motorboats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean is facing a moment of truth.

The government has until Friday to complete its responses to a lawsuit by advocacy groups seeking the release of a secret legal memo outlining its justifications for the strikes. Beyond that, the administration must file arguments by June 5 in a separate lawsuit over the attacks, this one filed by relatives of two Trinidadian men killed in boat strikes. And the Defense Department’s inspector general has begun probing whether U.S. forces are following standard targeting methods in launching the attacks.

These legal and investigative efforts won’t necessarily stop President Donald Trump’s boat strikes. But critics of the strikes hope the suits will return lawmakers’ attention to what Brian Finucane, a former State Department career attorney, described to NOTUS as “a killing spree on autopilot” with no end in sight.

“It’s been overshadowed by a series of big issues, from the Venezuela operation to the Iran war,” yet the campaign is “legally dubious but also bad policy,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow told NOTUS. “It’s actually just extremely expensive to have large numbers of military assets doing this, spending tons of money to basically blow up wooden boats with outboard motors.”

The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. officials say the boat strikes are a valid effort in a war against drug traffickers, rejecting questions about their legality and civilian toll. The Trump administration hasn’t proved suspected smugglers represent a military threat or quelled concerns about using lethal and dramatic force as a first resort in combating drug smuggling.

The attacks have recently intensified despite warnings from legislators, international law experts and the United Nations that they could implicate Trump and American military officials in violations of domestic and international law, including murder and crimes against humanity.

Allowing the strikes to continue has broad and worrying ramifications, critics of the policy say. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights are involved in both lawsuits.

“This is in many ways worse, more problematic than Iran [in] that it relies on the president just waving a magic wand and saying we are in an armed conflict, when the factual predicate does not exist,” said Charlie Trumbull, another former career State Department lawyer now at the University of South Carolina. While experts doubt the legality of the current U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran, Washington has long identified Tehran as a foe, and Iranian officials have directed violence against Americans and American interests.

“It sets this precedent … that should really scare anyone, that means no one’s rights are protected,” Trumbull continued.

He pointed to the Trump administration’s recently released counterterrorism strategy, which identifies “left-wing extremists” — a category that could include domestic opponents of Trump’s policies — as a prime threat alongside “narcoterrorists,” the group purportedly targeted by the boat strikes.

Sarah Harrison, a former career Defense Department attorney, told NOTUS the policy asserts “a license to kill” that she also sees as more chilling than the assault on Iran. She said it’s an example of how U.S. foreign policy approaches following the 9/11 attack and Iraq and Afghanistan wars have come to dominate policy-making broadly.

“As lawyers who have worked on the forever wars for our whole careers, we’ve seen the forever wars expanded under legal authorities … under Trump, they’re using the desensitization about the expansion of wars among the American public to now go out and murder without limitation,” Harrison said. “Now there are no limits on the president directing our military to murder. It means he can slap a label on whoever in the country — that’s what’s terrifying.”

Not all of the people killed in boat strikes have been identified. However, a recent investigation by journalists with the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística and the British watchdog group Airwars named 20 victims of the boat strikes, many of whom were day laborers, and found little indication that attacks by warplanes and drones are more effective than conventional anti-narcotics tactics. The commander of U.S. Southern Command has publicly acknowledged the boat-strike policy cannot stem drug trafficking in America.

Making more information about the strikes public will be an uphill battle. “The legal doctrine is unfavorable to those seeking transparency,” Finucane said.

The government maintains that privileges around deliberations and attorney-client discussions, as well as the secrecy of intelligence and military matters, mean it is not required to release the memo justifying the strikes. Justice Department lawyers have emphasized “substantial deference owed to the agency’s declarations on matters of national security.” The Trump administration is also battling lawsuits from The New York Times and the Project on Government Oversight seeking the release of video of the first attack in the Caribbean, conducted on Sept. 2, 2025.

The Pentagon inspector general’s evaluation does not appear to be considering whether the boat strikes are illegal, Harrison said. The probe will likely focus on the data that military personnel are using to choose its targets — potentially pattern-of-life-analysis — and whether Defense Department lawyers are being appropriately consulted, she added.

Still, the announcement left open the possibility of examining other issues. The Pentagon claims it’s operating in line with the law of war, which suggests it’s fair to press officials on potentially violating aspects of that law by, for instance, using aircraft that look like civilian planes (which could represent “perfidy”) or by launching “double-tap” attacks killing the survivors of initial attacks, such as the Sept. 2 strike. (Most legal experts say the law of war is not the relevant framework to apply to the policy because it does not constitute a war.)

Renewed discussions about the boat strikes and action in the courts could help reignite pressure from Congress. Lawmakers from both parties have repeatedly expressed concern about the first attack, which was documented in the video sought by POGO and The Times. On May 21, POGO challenged the government’s effort to put a “stay” on their case.

Last year, lawmakers from both parties cited the Sept. 2 attack to successfully push the administration to grant them access to government videos and the legal memo purportedly underpinning the strikes. Under the Obama administration, congressional pressure helped spur the release of another secret government memo authorizing the killing of U.S. citizen and Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki.

Brett Max Kaufman, an ACLU attorney, linked the Trump administration’s unwillingness to release information about the strikes to policies dating back decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

“The government’s apparent legal theory justifying the boat strikes is, in many ways, even more radical than the theories it used to target [al-Awlaki] and others, purportedly under congressional authorizations, over the past 25 years,” Kaufman said. “But at the same time, the executive branch’s clear and unrelenting position has been that the lawyers who work for the President will always have the final word, because the courts have no role to review actions the executive claims to take in furtherance of ‘national security.’ That is a recipe for impunity — and if accepted, the government doesn’t even need a legal theory, let alone a plausible one, to do the kinds of things it’s doing.

Though the administration has not publicly released the memo on the boat strikes, many lawmakers have seen it. Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri told NOTUS he found its reasoning “sound” and the campaign “very effective.”

“If the administration wanted to release it, I suppose they could voluntarily release it,” Schmitt said.

Crow, the House Democrat, has also reviewed the document. He said that with some redactions about intelligence sources and methods, “it can and should be made public.”

“My general sense is they don’t want to make it public because it’s a pretty farcical analysis,” Crow said.