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The capture of prisoners presents a major new set of legal and policy problems for the Trump administration in its escalating campaign.
Oct. 17, 2025Updated 2:12 p.m. ET
The U.S. Navy has rescued two survivors of an American military strike on a semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and is holding them aboard a Navy ship there, two U.S. officials said on Friday.
The Navy for now is detaining the two people aboard a warship in international waters, marking the first time the military has found itself holding prisoners from President Trump’s six-week-old campaign of targeting suspected drug runners as if they were combatants in a war.
The Trump administration now faces a dilemma about whether to release the two people, claim it can hold them as indefinite wartime detainees, or transfer them to civilian law enforcement officials for prosecution — a major and messy set of new legal and policy problems that could bring judicial scrutiny to the legally contested basis for its unfolding military campaign.
Since early September, the U.S. military has attacked at least six vessels that the Trump administration has said, without putting forward evidence, were carrying drugs. The first five were speedboats, but the most recent strike targeted a submersible vessel, the officials said.
The latest strike, on Thursday, killed two other people aboard the vessel, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But after the attack, surveillance video showed that there were survivors in the water.
A Navy search-and-rescue helicopter retrieved the two survivors and flew them to one of the eight Navy warships that had been dispatched to the region. The Trump administration has been building up firepower in the Caribbean Sea amid its escalating campaign against drugs and mounting pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president.
