They Were Killed in Caribbean Boat Strikes. Now Bereaved Families Are Suing the U.S. Government By Ben Brachfeld

The families of two Trinidadian men killed in one of three dozen airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean are suing the U.S. government.

Rishi Samaroo, 41, phoned his sister on Oct. 12 to inform her he had found a boat ride back home to Las Cuevas, Trinidad and Tobago after two months working on a dairy farm in Venezuela. Two days later, his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, read news reports and social media posts about the U.S. military blowing up a boat off the coast of Venezuela.

Korasingh says she and other family members tried to phone Samaroo multiple times, but the line remains dead to this day. They have not heard from Samaroo since.

Now Korasingh is suing the Trump administration. In a complaint filed in federal district court in Massachusetts, she and Lenore Burnley — whose son Chad Joseph, 26, was also on a boat from Venezuela to Las Cuevas and has not been heard from since — say the killings were “premeditated,” “intentional” and “lack any plausible legal justification.”

The families are seeking damages under the Death on the High Seas Act and the federal Alien Tort Statute.

“Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again,” Korasingh said in a press release shared by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the pair alongside Seton Hall University and the Center for Constitutional Rights. “If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him. They must be held accountable.”

Samaroo and Joseph are two of at least 125 people killed in 36 lethal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September.

The Trump administration has contended that the boats are involved in drug trafficking. On Oct. 14, President Donald Trump said on social media that the boat Samaroo and Joseph were on was “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking,” claiming without evidence that this was confirmed by “intelligence” and that the six men aboard were “narcoterrorists.”

Their family members dispute that claim, saying Samaroo and Joseph were fishermen and itinerant workers. Samaroo was on parole after a 15-year sentence for participating in a homicide, and had been fishing and working in construction to support his family before going to work at the Venezuelan dairy farm, according to the ACLU.

Joseph lived with his wife and three children in Las Cuevas, and frequently traveled to Venezuela for fishing and farm work. He called his wife on Oct. 12 to inform her he had found a ride home to the island nation — then was never heard from again.

The administration has claimed the right to conduct the strikes in international waters through an unpublished memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, per the complaint, which allegedly claims the U.S. government is engaged in armed international conflict with “unspecified drug cartels in Latin America.”

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“Because there is, in fact, no non-international armed conflict with the drug cartels purportedly targeted in the strikes (and no evidence that the boats targeted are associated with cartels), the killings violate the bedrock prohibition against extrajudicial killing and are simply murders on the high seas,” the complaint reads.

The strikes have continued to this day. The military announced on Jan. 23 that it had struck a boat in the eastern Pacific and killed two “narco-terrorists,” while one survived.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon declined to comment, citing pending litigation.