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The Pentagon said one person survived a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Pacific, but after searching for days, Mexican officials are about to give up.
Oct. 31, 2025, 5:28 p.m. ET
Mexico said on Friday that it had not found any survivors from the U.S. military strikes that killed at least 14 people this week, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said days ago that one person had survived the attack on boats that the Trump administration accused of trafficking drugs.
The Pentagon said that after the strikes on Monday, U.S. military officials “observed one narcoterrorist in the water clinging to some wreckage.” U.S. officials then alerted a Mexican military boat nearby of the survivor, the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday, and Mexican officials assumed responsibility for the rescue.
The Mexican Navy said on Friday that its forces officially began a search-and-rescue operation for the “alleged castaway” at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday in the area U.S. officials reported a survivor, some 456 nautical miles from the nearest point of Mexico, in Acapulco. After not finding any survivor, the Navy said it planned to stop actively searching on Saturday morning, in accordance with typical practices of a 96-hour search.
The U.S. Coast Guard said on Friday that the strikes occurred on Monday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when U.S. officials alerted Mexico of the person clinging to the wreckage.
The Coast Guard said it received word from the Mexican Navy on Tuesday afternoon that it had not found any survivors. The Coast Guard and the Pentagon referred further questions to Mexican officials.
In announcing the round of three deadly strikes on four boats on social media on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth said that a “total of 14 narco-terrorists were killed during the three strikes, with one survivor.”
“All strikes were in international waters with no U.S. forces harmed,” he said, adding that Mexican search-and-rescue authorities had “accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue.”
The Pentagon statement on Friday said the U.S. forces acted “in accordance with international protocols for a distressed person in the water” and “relayed the precise location and status of the person in the water” to a Mexican military aircraft that was operating nearby.
Since late August, the U.S. military has deployed about 10,000 troops to the Caribbean, about half of them on eight warships and half in Puerto Rico, for what the administration says is a counterterrorism and counternarcotics mission. Mr. Hegseth last week also ordered the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford to Latin America from the Mediterranean. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.
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In his social media post on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth compared the strikes against the boats to America’s wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan over more than two decades.
But a broad range of outside experts in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even criminal suspects — who are not directly participating in armed hostilities.
The Trump administration has asserted that the president has the power to “determine,” without any authorization from Congress, that drug cartels and those who work for them are enemy combatants.
Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that each destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are from fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has criticized the attacks, suggesting they violate international treaties. She said Mexico’s foreign minister met with the U.S. ambassador to Mexico this week in part to discuss the issue, and on Friday, the head of Mexico’s Navy was set to talk with Coast Guard officials about the strikes.
Mexican officials have felt especially uneasy about the Trump administration’s willingness to use military force against what it calls “narcoterrorists” because some of the most powerful drug cartels are based in Mexico and are the sources of most of the fentanyl in the United States.
Mr. Trump has suggested that he would like to use military force against Mexican cartels. Ms. Sheinbaum has strongly rejected that idea and, for now, it appears that U.S. and Mexican officials are largely satisfied with their cooperation to combat the gangs.
Bipartisan frustration over the administration’s failure to provide detailed information about the strikes and their legal underpinnings is mounting on Capitol Hill.
On Friday, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee released two letters they had sent to Mr. Hegseth in recent weeks requesting the specific military orders as well as detailed legal rationale for the Pentagon’s operations against what it says are drug trafficking cartels in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific.
The senators, Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said they had also requested any written opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel regarding the domestic or international legal basis for the military operations.
They asked for a complete list of all designated terrorist organizations and drug trafficking organizations with whom Mr. Trump has asserted the United States is engaged in armed conflict.
“To date, these documents have not been submitted,” the committee said in a statement on Friday.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Jack Nicas is The Times’s Mexico City bureau chief, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
