The families of two Trinidadian men believed killed during a U.S. military strike at sea are suing the U.S. government, alleging the deaths were unlawful and unjustified.
Rishi Samaroo, 41, called his sister on Oct. 12 to say he had secured a boat ride back to Las Cuevas, Trinidad and Tobago, after spending two months working on a dairy farm in Venezuela. Two days later, his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, saw news reports and social media posts describing the U.S. military blowing up a boat off Venezuela’s coast.
Korasingh says relatives repeatedly tried calling Samaroo afterward, but the phone line has remained dead. No one in the family has heard from him since.
In a complaint filed in federal district court in Massachusetts, Korasingh and Lenore Burnley — whose son, Chad Joseph, 26, was also aboard a boat traveling from Venezuela to Las Cuevas and has not been heard from since — claim the killings were “premeditated,” “intentional,” and without “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 families 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.”
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Samaroo and Joseph are among at least 125 people reported killed in 36 military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September, according to the lawsuit.
The Trump administration has argued the targeted boats were involved in drug trafficking. On Oct. 14, President Donald Trump said on social media that the boat carrying Samaroo and Joseph was “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking,” and claimed — without presenting evidence publicly — that “intelligence” confirmed the six men aboard were “narcoterrorists.”
The families reject that description, saying both men were fishermen and itinerant workers. According to the ACLU, Samaroo had been working fishing and construction jobs to support his family before taking the dairy farm job in Venezuela. He was also on parole following a 15-year sentence for participating in a homicide.
Joseph, the lawsuit says, lived in Las Cuevas with his wife and three children and often traveled to Venezuela for fishing and farm work. He called his wife on Oct. 12 to say he had found a ride home — and then disappeared.
The complaint also challenges the legal basis for the strikes, alleging the administration has relied on an unpublished memo from the Office of Legal Counsel to justify lethal operations in international waters. That memo, the lawsuit claims, argues the U.S. is engaged in an armed international conflict with “unspecified drug cartels in Latin America.”
“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 states.
The strikes have continued. The military announced on Jan. 23 that it struck a boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people it described as “narco-terrorists,” while another person survived.
A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.
