Posted by Ryan Devereaux

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/24/el-mencho-mexico-fbi-task-force-counter-cartel/

A new player in the U.S. military’s decadeslong war on drugs announced itself to the world on Sunday, providing intelligence that supported a Mexican military operation that killed the head of the infamous Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Though details continue to emerge from the operation, which set off a spasm of violence that left at least 70 people dead, some of the information that led Mexican security forces to Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was delivered by a new Joint Interagency Task Force called Counter Cartel, based out of Southern Arizona.

The outfit operates out of Fort Huachuca, a military intelligence hub nestled in a rugged mountain chain 15 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border. According to media reports, the task force, staffed by a combination of some 300 military and civilian employees, provided its Mexican counterparts with a “detailed target package” in the run-up to Sunday’s operation. The CIA also provided key support for the mission.

Existence of the task force was first revealed in a little-noticed ceremony at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, last month. Its online footprint is slight. The information that is publicly available, however, confirms deepening ties between President Donald Trump’s domestic homeland security agenda and his lethal drug war operations abroad.

Known internally as JIATF-CC, the task force is part of the U.S. Military’s Northern Command, once considered a backwater that today enjoys renewed prominence under Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In the past year, Trump and Hegseth have used the Southern Command, NORTHCOM’s counterpart in the Western Hemisphere, as well the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, to conduct the kinds of targeted killing missions long associated with the war on terror against targets in Latin America.

To date, the military has conducted more than 40 airstrikes against alleged drug traffickers, killing at least 137 people without producing a shred of evidence to support its claims. While those strikes have been concentrated in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, the task force involved in Sunday’s Mexico operation is distinct for its focus much closer to U.S. soil.

“What the Trump administration has done more than its predecessors is give NORTHCOM a hugely bigger role,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group.

With that newfound stature has come a greater level of secrecy over what, exactly, the command is up to — and whether its operations might spill back over the border into the U.S.

In years past, when his organization would raise concerns over U.S. operations, the military would make available attorneys who could quote the Posse Comitatus Act — the law restricting military involvement in domestic policing — by chapter and verse, Isacson recalled. No more. Even his contacts on Capitol Hill, staffers working on armed services and homeland security issues, have found their letters to department chiefs met with silence.

“It freaks me out when I talk to oversight staff,” he said. “They’re just not getting answers.”

Scant Public Information

In a sparse January press release, Northern Command said the JIATF-CC is a component of the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center. Its mission, the release said, is to “identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel operations posing a threat to the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

While information on the coordinating center is similarly scant, FBI national security branch operations director Michael Glasheen testified in December before the House Committee on Homeland Security that the president created a wide network of Homeland Security Task Forces in accordance with an executive order he signed on his first day back in office in January 2025.

Titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the order called on the attorney general and the DHS secretary to “jointly establish Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all States nationwide.” Their shared mission would be to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States” and “dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks.”

Though the order made no mention of the U.S. military, Glasheen’s testimony confirmed the Pentagon had joined the HSTF mission.

“This task force construct is the first of its kind,” he told lawmakers, taking a “whole-of-government” approach and “consolidating all of U.S. law enforcement, military, and intelligence efforts into a targeted effort in combatting these threats.” According to Glasheen, individual task forces are led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Related

Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities

In addition to more than 8,500 federal agents and officers, hundreds of analysts and legal attachés from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies support the HSTF mission worldwide, Glasheen testified. The national coordination center that the new border-focused JIATF-CC belongs to, he continued, “serves as the primary federal coordinating entity to align law enforcement, defense, and intelligence efforts.”

A recent job posting for a database administrator for the center — requiring at least a “secret” security clearance and paying upward of $189,750 a year — described the “care and feeding” of hundreds of terabytes of law enforcement data.

The precise relationship between the U.S. military and federal agencies like ICE and the FBI in support of the president’s homeland security mission is unclear. Northern Command did not respond to The Intercept’s request for an interview.

Crossing Borders

For generations, the U.S. military has played a driving role in the drug war abroad, training allied security forces, sharing intelligence on wanted drug traffickers, and facilitating covert kill-capture operations in nations such Colombia and Mexico.

Related

When Soldiers Patrol the Border, Civilians Get Killed

Beginning under President Ronald Reagan and continuing into the administration of Bill Clinton, Northern Command oversaw a steady growth in military counternarcotics operations on the U.S.–Mexico border, including on U.S. soil. Those operations ended when a Marine sniper team killed an American teenager named Esequiel Hernández while he was tending his family’s goats in West Texas in 1997.

Since then, the Pentagon has largely kept its focus south of the border. That, however, may be changing. A defense official speaking to Reuters said the new Arizona task military force is working to map suspected drug cartel networks on both sides of the international divide.

The director of the task force, U.S. Brig. Gen. Maurizio Calabrese, compared his team’s mission to the targeted killing campaigns previously waged against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The motivations were different, he said, but in terms of sheer size, the drug cartel threat was perhaps even larger.

The general estimated that hundreds of leaders occupied the upper echelons of Mexican organized crime, supported by as many as a quarter-million lower-level operatives, which he referred to as “independent contractors.”

Correction: February 24, 2026, 2:26 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to the militay commands responsible for strikes against alleged drug smugglers. The strikes were carried out by the Southern and Special Operations Commands.

The post Mexico Got Help Killing Drug Lord From Secretive U.S. Campaign Led by FBI and ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/24/el-mencho-mexico-fbi-task-force-counter-cartel/

Posted by Liliana Segura

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/24/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-vindictive-prosecution/

Almost a year after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was first targeted by the U.S. government as part of its violent mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is still not done punishing him.

The 30-year-old father of three became an emblem of Trump’s cruelty and lawlessness after being abducted and sent to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran torture prison where hundreds of people were incarcerated last year at the behest of the White House. After conceding that Abrego had been expelled in “error” — violating a court order barring Abrego’s deportation to his country of origin — the Trump administration nonetheless refused to bring Abrego back to the U.S., smearing him as a terrorist and leaving him to endure months of violence, deprivation, and psychological torture.

Abrego was finally returned last June. But his arrival only marked a surreal new chapter in his ordeal. Rather than bring him back to Maryland, where he lived with his wife and young children, he was jailed in Tennessee, as federal prosecutors devised a dubious new case against him. Before he’d even landed on U.S. soil, Abrego was indicted on sweeping criminal charges for allegedly smuggling gang members across state lines over the course of a decade.

Abrego, who has pleaded not guilty, was supposed to go to trial in January at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. But late last year, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw canceled the trial date, instead scheduling an evidentiary hearing on a pending question before the court: whether Abrego is the target of a “selective and vindictive prosecution” by the Trump administration.

The hearing, set for Thursday morning at the federal courthouse in Nashville, will ultimately determine whether the criminal case against Abrego moves forward. If Crenshaw concludes that Abrego was indeed the target of a revenge campaign, he could dismiss the case altogether.

As a legal and historical matter, this would be a big deal — and a major defeat for federal prosecutors. But it would also fall far short of accountability for those who have dedicated themselves to ruining Abrego’s life. Nor does it stand to impact the countless others whose lives have been destroyed by Trump’s lawless mass deportations. Abrego’s case, which so shocked the American public in the early days of the president’s term, was a harbinger of things to come. “We really thought this was going to be one of a kind,” one of his immigration lawyers recently told NPR. “If anything, it was just the tip of the spear.”

Related

The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS-13: A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie

Abrego was released from jail last year and spent the holidays with his family. While not currently incarcerated, he remains under federal supervision and still faces deportation. He entered the country illegally as a teenager to escape gang violence in El Salvador, was given “withholding from removal” status by an immigration judge in 2019, which allowed him to live and work in the U.S. while checking in once a year with ICE. But the Trump administration dismantled such protections, arresting Abrego in March 2025. While his criminal case has placed his removal on hold, the federal government has gone to extreme lengths to make his eventual deportation a punishment unto itself, scheming to send him to a third country in Africa rather than Latin America.

Abrego’s prosecution is also a potent example of Trump’s eagerness to weaponize the Justice Department against those who cross him. In the year since Abrego was sent to CECOT, the DOJ — whose headquarters now feature a large banner of Trump’s face — has dropped any pretense of independence. One associate deputy attorney general who was apparently instrumental to Abrego’s prosecution reportedly told U.S. attorneys last month that Trump is their “chief client.”

This makes Abrego’s upcoming hearing a new test of the courts. Crenshaw, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2015, has already put himself in the crosshairs by considering Abrego’s rare vindictive prosecution challenge. The hearing comes at a moment when federal judges are increasingly vocal about the threat posed by the Trump regime, while the president and his backers increasingly villainize the judges who stand in their way.

On the surface, the question of whether Abrego is the target of a “vindictive prosecution” is no mystery. The government’s brazen retribution campaign has been publicized at every turn.

To recap: After Trump invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to declare an “invasion” of gang members in mid-March 2025, exiling hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to CECOT, Abrego appeared in a photo taken at the prison, released by the Salvadoran government. The overhead image showed two rows of men kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their shaved heads. His wife recognized Abrego from his tattoos.

On March 24, 2025, Abrego sued for his release. Less than two weeks later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return — and the Supreme Court upheld her order. Rather than complying, Trump held a backslapping Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to Bukele, not Trump, to bring Abrego back to the U.S.

For the next several weeks, the Trump administration demonized Abrego, repeatedly labeling him a gang member and releasing records showing that his wife took out an order of protection against him years earlier. The Department of Homeland Security posted on X that Abrego was “not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as” — a line loudly amplified by Trump’s supporters.

Related

Deportation, Inc.

Abrego was finally flown back to the U.S. in June 2025 — but only after the DOJ laid the groundwork for a new criminal case against him, which allowed Trump to put a new spin on the government’s narrative. At a press conference on June 6, Bondi announced that Abrego had been indicted for playing a “significant role in an alien smuggling ring” — crimes she described as his “full-time job — and that he had been returned to the U.S. to face justice.

The same line was parroted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, on Fox News. As Abrego’s lawyers lay out in their vindictive prosecution motion, Blanche — who was previously Trump’s defense attorney — declared that the DOJ began investigating Abrego only after “a judge in Maryland” interfered with Trump’s decision to deport him.

Abrego’s motion also points to comments made by Trump aboard Air Force One, in which he said the DOJ made its decision in response to “these judges [who] want to try and run the country.” Asked by a reporter how the criminal case came to pass, Trump said, “I could see a decision being made — bring him back, show everybody how horrible this guy is. And frankly we have to do something because the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide.”

Finally, Abrego’s lawyers highlight the resignation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Schrader, who quit his position as chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee the same day Abrego was indicted, “reportedly over concerns that the case was being pursued for ‘political reasons.’” (In an email to The Intercept, Schrader, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on the case.)

These arguments have already proven persuasive to Crenshaw. The federal district judge concluded last year that there was at least some evidence to show that Abrego’s prosecution was retaliatory in nature. “The totality of events” point to a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” he wrote last fall. He was struck by the timing of the government’s investigation of Abrego, which came “a mere seven days after he prevailed” at the Supreme Court, as well as by Blanche’s “remarkable statements,” which appeared to confirm that the prosecution was born of revenge for Abrego’s successful lawsuit “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Another STRONG SIGN that Abrego is the target of a vindictive prosecution is the weakness of the government’s criminal case itself. While the DOJ has insisted that it has damning evidence to show that Abrego is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the allegations look increasingly like a house of cards.

In September, prosecutors submitted a sworn affidavit laying out how the case against Abrego unfolded. The document, which was signed by Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire, traces the case back to November 30, 2022, when Abrego was pulled over on the highway in Putnam County, Tennessee, while driving a Chevy Suburban carrying eight passengers, all of whom were Latino. State troopers questioned Abrego but ultimately sent him on his way without a ticket.

The affidavit acknowledges that the traffic stop did not lead to a prosecution until 2025. As McGuire tells it, he got a call the night of April 27, 2025, from the local Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations about “potential human smuggling committed by Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia,” who by then was already famous for being sent to CECOT. According to the affidavit, McGuire, who had experience with smuggling cases, “decided to handle the matter himself.” After examining body camera footage from the Tennessee Highway Patrol, he “immediately noted the similarities” between the footage and cases he had handled.

“Over the next several weeks, law enforcement conducted multiple interviews of individuals with information about Abrego Garcia’s activities in Tennessee and elsewhere,” the affidavit goes on. McGuire ultimately concluded that Abrego “had been involved in a human smuggling conspiracy for years.” The evidence was in fact “overwhelming.”

But at a lengthy detention hearing last year, the government’s case against Abrego looked flimsy at best, cobbled together from dubious statements made by highly incentivized federal informants, none of whom actually took the stand. Prosecutors’ sole witness was an HSI special agent whose testimony was based on interviews he neither conducted nor attended — evidence the presiding judge skeptically described as “multiple levels of hearsay.”

McGuire, who represented the government at the hearing, also sought to link Abrego to “a mass casualty event” involving some of the “same actors” involved in his alleged smuggling scheme. But when the judge asked whether any testimony would show that Abrego himself was involved in this mass casualty event, McGuire said no.

Lawyers with the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, which represented Abrego at the time, pointed out myriad holes in the government’s case. “The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues,” one attorney argued. The informants provided their statements as part of deals that would allow them to avoid deportation, giving them an obvious incentive to lie. What’s more, “their stories are facially implausible.” The informants claimed that Abrego often brought his own children with him as he zig-zagged across the U.S. for his smuggling operation. “The idea that he is taking them on these cross-country trips multiple times per week is just ridiculous on its face.”

A few weeks later, the judge ruled in Abrego’s favor, finding that there was no evidence that justified keeping him in jail while awaiting trial. But she noted that he would almost certainly be kept behind bars either way, given the “anticipated removal proceedings that are outside the jurisdiction of this Court.” While this might make her decision appear to be “little more than an academic exercise,” she wrote, “the foundation of the administration of our criminal law depends on the bedrock of due process. … The Court will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed.”

In their motion alleging that Abrego is the target of a selective and vindictive prosecution, his lawyers acknowledge that the legal threshold is high. To win, they must prove that Abrego was specifically targeted for exercising his constitutional rights in court. Such claims “are infrequently made and rarely succeed,” they write. “But if there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”

Indeed, as the lawyers lay out, Abrego was sent to CECOT, successfully sued for his release, and was then slapped with a dubious and apparently politically motivated criminal case. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”

In the six months since they first asked Crenshaw to throw out the case on these grounds, the evidence supporting their argument has only gotten stronger. Crenshaw has repeatedly ordered the DOJ to turn over materials that might further illuminate the DOJ’s decision to prosecute Abrego, often to no avail. When prosecutors have turned over evidence, the disclosures have undermined their own case.

On December 30, Crenshaw unsealed an order that appeared especially damning. The judge had examined thousands of pages of government documents submitted for his review, ultimately determining that a portion should be turned over to Abrego’s legal team. “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker,” Crenshaw wrote, “but he, in fact, reported to others in DOJ with others who may or may not have acted with improper motivation.”

The “others” in question include Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche, and who appeared to have “a leading role” in the decision to prosecute Abrego. A recent Bloomberg Law profile of Singh described the former gang prosecutor as “the Trump Justice Department’s brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on US attorneys’ autonomy,” noting that Singh pushed prosecutors to go after people like Abrego, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CNN host Don Lemon.

Crenshaw’s order supports this characterization, highlighting emails and conversations between Singh and McGuire last year. On April 27, 2025 — the same day McGuire reportedly heard about HSI’s investigation into a potential smuggling case against Abrego, according to the previously submitted affidavit — Crenshaw noted that Singh contacted McGuire “to discuss Abrego’s case.” This detail was not included in the government’s original narrative.

Also absent from McGuire’s affidavit was the fact that Singh told McGuire that Abrego’s prosecution was a “top priority” for Blanche — and that McGuire, who explicitly said that he’d decided to handle the Abrego case “himself,” later wrote to his staff in mid-May that Blanche wanted Abrego charged “sooner rather than later.”

To Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who famously traveled to El Salvador to see Abrego and remains an outspoken advocate in his case, the disclosures were a “smoking gun.” As he told CNN, the unsealed document shows that the DOJ “decided to bring these charges against [Abrego] because he asserted his due process rights when they illegally shipped him off to CECOT.”

With the evidentiary hearing approaching, the Trump administration has kept stalling, rather than turn over additional evidence. Last month, prosecutors filed a new motion explaining why it should not have to provide material it had previously agreed to disclose. Whereas the DOJ once agreed it was obligated to turn over the prior statements of the witnesses they planned to call to the stand — tentatively two HSI investigators, as well as McGuire himself — prosecutors now argued that, in fact, they do not have to turn those statements after all. Their previous position was rooted in “an honest misunderstanding” of the applicable law, they wrote, a mistake “largely based on the fact that these kinds of hearings are exceedingly rare.”

Whether or not DOJ prosecutors ever turn over the materials in question, the government’s witnesses could face a hard time if called to testify on Thursday. Crenshaw already appears to have caught the Trump administration in a series of lies, which could ultimately prompt him to simply call the government’s bluff and just end the farcical prosecution altogether.

“If there were any communications or documents that helped the government prove its narrative that this case was not motivated by vindictiveness, the government would no doubt have produced them,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote last month. “The Court should draw the obvious inference that flows from the government’s stonewalling: the presumption of vindictiveness is warranted and unrebutted, and this case must be dismissed.”

The post Trump Won’t Stop Trying to Punish Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared first on The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/24/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-vindictive-prosecution/

Posted by Tomi McCluskey, Nick Turse

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/17/boat-strike-trump-southcom-survivors-rescue-plane-hours/

The conditions were treacherous in the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles off the Mexico–Guatemala border. There were gale-force winds and 9-foot seas. It would be dangerous if you were on a boat, nevermind if yours was blown out of the water.

Eight men leapt into those rough seas on December 30 when the U.S. rained down a barrage of munitions, sinking three vessels. They required immediate rescue; chances were slim that they could survive even an hour. In announcing its strike, U.S. Southern Command or SOUTHCOM, said it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue protocols to save the men.

But it took the United States Coast Guard almost 45 hours to begin searching the attack zone for survivors, new reporting by Airwars and The Intercept reveals.

Help did not arrive in time. A total of 11 civilians died due to the U.S. attack on December 30 — including the eight who jumped overboard, according to information provided exclusively to The Intercept by SOUTHCOM, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in and around Latin America and the Caribbean. This represents one of the largest single-day death tolls since the U.S. military began targeting alleged drug smuggling boats last September.

Using open-source flight tracking data, Airwars and The Intercept learned that a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days. A timeline provided by the Coast Guard confirmed that it was roughly 45 hours before a flight arrived at the search area.

The slow response and lack of rescue craft in the area suggests there was scant interest on the part of the U.S. in saving anyone. It’s part of a pattern of what appear to be imitation rescue missions that since mid-October have not saved a single survivor.

Related

The U.S. Has Killed More than 150 People in Boat Strikes. We’re Tracking Them All.

On December 30, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the Coast Guard’s parent agency — the Department of Homeland Security — that SOUTHCOM stood ready to provide them with “specialized maritime capabilities” in support of their missions. But just hours later, it was SOUTHCOM that called on the Coast Guard to conduct the search and rescue mission for the eight men.

The Coast Guard told The Intercept that it received the initial report of people in distress from SOUTHCOM at 1:40 p.m. Pacific time on December 30. (The exact timing of the U.S. strike is not known, but when SOUTHCOM posted about the attack on X the following day it wrote that it had “immediately notified” the Coast Guard).

The survivors jumped into the Pacific approximately 400 nautical miles southwest of Ocos, Guatemala. They faced extreme conditions: 9-foot seas and 40-knot winds, according to Kenneth Wiese, a spokesperson for the Coast Guard Southwest District.

The Coast Guard said it soon began contacting Maritime Rescue Coordination Centers in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica; the Central American Air Navigation Services Corporation, which provides regional air traffic control and search and rescue coordination; and eight commercial vessels within 200 nautical miles of the last known position of the survivors. A lone container vessel, the Maersk Eureka, responded to the call. On December 31 at 6:44 a.m. Pacific time, the ship arrived at the last known position of the survivors and found nothing.

That morning at 9:19 a.m. Pacific time, a Coast Guard C-130 search and rescue plane took off from Sacramento, California, and headed to Liberia, Costa Rica, “for refueling and crew rest.” A day later, on January 1 at 7:33 a.m. Pacific time, the aircraft left Costa Rica and headed toward the “search area,” according to the Coast Guard. It finally arrived “on scene” at 10:18 a.m. Pacific time on New Year’s Day.

The Coast Guard said that it suspended its search on January 2, reporting “no sightings of survivors or debris.” A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said the men were presumed dead when the search was ended.

“Suspending a search is never easy, and given the exhaustive search effort, lack of positive indications, and declining probability of survival, we have suspended active search efforts pending further developments,” said Coast Guard Capt. Patrick Dill, chief of incident management, Southwest District, at the time.

A second government official who spoke with The Intercept said the Coast Guard response didn’t look like “foot dragging,” but 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.

Asked for comment on the allegation, Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud said: “SOUTHCOM does not comment on speculative or unfounded reporting.”

The Coast Guard confirmed the C-130 sent from Sacramento was its only aircraft in the area. “There were no other Coast Guard assets in the area to assist with the search,” said spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Lauren Giancola.

The Coast Guard would not explain why it hadn’t pre-positioned assets in the region. “Any questions regarding military operations including recent strikes should be referred directly to the Department of War,” Giancola told The Intercept.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not return a request for comment.

The search and rescue operation for the boat strike survivors differs starkly from the U.S. response when a U.S. Marine involved in the military campaign in the Caribbean fell overboard from the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima in the SOUTHCOM area of operations this month. It sparked a “nonstop search and rescue operation” that included hundreds of flight hours and extensive aviation support, according to a statement from the Marines’ II Marine Expeditionary Force. Five Navy ships, a rigid-hull inflatable boat, surface rescue swimmers from the Iwo Jima, and 10 aircraft from the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force joined the search efforts. (Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, was declared deceased on Feb. 10, 2026.)

The slow pace of the U.S. search for boat strike survivors suggests the goal wasn’t to save lives, said Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war.

“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?’” he told The Intercept. “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.”

The U.S. military has carried out more than three dozen known attacks, destroying 40 boats, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 134 civilians.  The most recent attack on Friday – the first known strike in the Caribbean Sea since early November – killed three people.

From the first strike, crewmembers have periodically survived initial attacks, leading the U.S. to employ a hodgepodge of strategies to deal with them, ranging from execution to repatriation. The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed two survivors of the initial boat attack on September 2 in a follow-up strike. The two survivors clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked by the U.S. military for roughly 45 minutes before Adm. Frank Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a follow-up strike that killed the shipwrecked men.

Related

U.S. Attacked Boat Near Venezuela Multiple Times to Kill Survivors

Following an October 16 attack on a semi-submersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. President Donald Trump called them “terrorists” in a Truth Social post and said they would face “detention and prosecution.” But both men were released without charges in their home countries. Since this attack, the U.S. appears to have settled on a strategy of calling for what increasingly resemble imitation rescue missions.

Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted Mexican authorities. The man was not found, and he is presumed dead.

Last month, SOUTHCOM again called on the Coast Guard. “On Friday, January 23rd, the U.S. Coast Guard was notified by the Department of War’s Southern Command of a person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,” Coast Guard spokesperson Roberto Nieves told The Intercept. A timeline provided by the Coast Guard shows that it took about 17 hours for a Coast Guard C-130 to arrive at the survivor’s last known position, but that aircraft only conducted an hourlong search before “diverting to El Salvador for fuel and crew rest.” It returned to the last known position of the survivor on January 25, about 51 hours after the initial distress call. The search was suspended that night just before 8 p.m. Pacific time, and that person is now also presumed dead.

Following a strike last week — the third since Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan became SOUTHCOM’s new commander earlier this month — the command announced that it had once again notified the Coast Guard “to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor.” The Coast Guard, in turn, told The Intercept that Ecuador’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center “assumed coordination of search and rescue operations, with technical support provided by the U.S. Coast Guard.” The Coast Guard then walked it back and said the U.S. had only “offered” assistance. Ecuador’s rescue authorities did not return multiple requests for an update on the search.

The second government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment about the boat strikes, said that survivors created “complications and questions” for the U.S. military and intelligence community. Rather than risk exposing intelligence sources and methods by bringing these men to court, the official said it was simpler to leave them to drown. Finucane echoed this assessment. “After rescuing the men in October, it was apparent there would be a strong incentive not to have additional survivors on their hands,” he said.

William Baumgartner, a retired U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral and former chief counsel of that service branch, said the December 30 attack was tantamount to a death sentence. “Once the people jump in the water and you blow up the only thing that could possibly save their lives, that’s essentially killing them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept last month. “The expected result is essentially the same as putting a gun to their head.”

Experts say the survivors of the December 30 attacks likely died within minutes. Accomplished swimmers, clinging to wreckage or flotation devices in warmer waters, could survive longer, some said. None considered that likely in this case.

“The combination of the wind and the waves would force feed water into the victim. If the waves don’t drown you, the hypothermia will kill you,” said Tom Griffiths, the founder of the Aquatic Safety Research Group, who previously served as the director of aquatics and safety officer for athletics at Penn State University. “Drowning often takes as little as four to six minutes for a non-swimmer but can be as quick as 90 seconds. I would think under these conditions it could be almost as quick.”

John Fletemeyer, an aquatics expert and co-author of “The Science of Drowning,” said that people have survived in the water for up to two days. But such cases, he said, are “outliers.”

“It can be almost instantaneous, where it can happen in just a couple minutes if someone cannot swim and they go underwater,” Fletemeyer said. A frequent expert in murder-homicide cases, he explained in detail the pain and suffering involved in drowning. There is also the potential for shark attack, he said, due to blood in the water from those killed in the initial strike.

“If we know somebody is in the water dying,” he said, “I think we have a human responsibility to try to save them.”

The post U.S. Sent a Rescue Plane for Boat Strike Survivors. It Took 45 Hours to Arrive. appeared first on The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2026/02/17/boat-strike-trump-southcom-survivors-rescue-plane-hours/