Imagine walking out of a grocery store into flashing police lights. Two suspects are kneeling with their hands up, visibly unarmed. Someone nearby says a drug sale may have taken place. Yet, despite the lack of threat, an officer suddenly shoots and kills one suspect, then shoots the second. When he sees that the second man is only wounded, he fires again, killing him.
No American would accept this kind of law enforcement. Yet, it parallels what our military has now begun doing to “suspected drug boats” in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
I spent 25 years in the Coast Guard and have extensive real-world experience with suspected smugglers off our coasts. I know the human toll illegal drugs take on our communities. However, there is a reason we have never used lethal force against a vessel’s occupants based solely on suspicion.
Standard procedure is to stop the vessel, board it, search it, and confirm the presence of contraband before escalating to lethal force — and only when there is a real threat. Firing on a boat to kill its crew without a confirmed threat is the maritime equivalent of bypassing arrest, trial and conviction, and executing a suspected street-corner dealer on the spot.
There are also legal constraints that exist for a reason. Posse Comitatus prohibits the Navy from conducting domestic law enforcement. The Coast Guard, by contrast, is exempt and specifically trained to carry out maritime interdictions under U.S. law. This framework is designed to ensure that force is used proportionally, based on evidence — not on unconfirmed intelligence or perceived convenience.
In practice, it is rare for drug-boat operators to resist a boarding. They may flee or ignore orders to stop, and in such cases, we may use disabling fire aimed at engines, not people. Once a vessel is halted, crew members rarely pose an imminent threat. Many of them are fishermen or charter captains coerced with modest payments — or direct threats — to ferry contraband. They are not senior cartel members. Killing them does nothing to dismantle the criminal networks behind the trade; it only destroys the lives of people exploited by those networks.
Boarding a vessel is also the only way to confirm intelligence that drugs are onboard. Intelligence, no matter how compelling, is never confirmation. Proper boarding procedures ensure contraband is seized, evidence is preserved, and trafficking pipelines are disrupted in measurable ways. Boarding also yields valuable intelligence: operators often provide information that helps target future smuggling activities more precisely. Once suspects are arrested, they are given due process, an essential protection in American justice.
Just as important, the Coast Guard has a statutory duty to save lives at sea. If a vessel capsizes during pursuit, we rescue everyone aboard, including smugglers. We do not leave people to die, and we certainly do not kill them. Unless there is an imminent threat, they pose no danger warranting lethal force.
That principle has long guided Coast Guard operations and reflects the values that define our service.
I understand the Trump administration’s frustration with organizations that move illegal drugs into the United States. Traffickers do exploit procedural gaps to evade justice. However, dismantling safeguards designed to protect innocent people — and ensure punishment is proportional to crimes proven in court — is a grotesque deviation from American norms. Lethal force may be justified when there is a genuine imminent threat to U.S. service members or civilians. In the cases I have seen, no such threat exists.
When contraband is found, the people aboard are often not hardened criminals. Many are low-level workers whose livelihoods, or families, are held hostage by cartels. Transporting drugs is illegal and should result in prosecution. Does someone in that position deserve to die off our coasts, their death later used as a political talking point in Washington? Of course not.
We are better than this.
It is deeply troubling that the administration is effectively instructing service members to treat suspicion as justification for lethal force. For decades, our service character has been defined not by how many “bad guys” we catch, but by whether we do it the right way. What is right is arresting suspects, charging them with specific crimes, giving them the opportunity to defend themselves in court, and ensuring punishments match the offenses. What is happening now is the opposite.
“Shoot first, ask questions later” may be a movie trope, but in real life, it endangers human life and corrodes the rule of law. Killing people who have not been convicted of any crime — and using their deaths as political theater — is a moral and legal travesty. It undermines the work my colleagues and I dedicated our careers to: service grounded in lawfulness, self-sacrifice and respect for human life.
Anyone suspected of a crime in or near U.S. waters deserves treatment consistent with American maritime law — transparent, legal and orderly. The same is true in any American community: people deserve humane treatment and the opportunity to defend themselves before a court of law. They do not deserve to be ordered to death for the spectacle of onlookers.