A 2024 Coast Guard Report Found 27 Percent Of Drug Boat Searches Came Back Empty-Handed, But What Does This Mean For Venezuelan Boat Strikes? It Means Many Innocents Have Been Murdered.
President Donald Trump says American military strikes on eight vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, mostly targeting boats from Venezuela, were legal because they carried drugs being delivered to the United States.
But Republican Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky, who is also chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said maritime law enforcement statistics show that not all boats suspected of carrying drugs actually have drugs onboard. He said the military’s strikes were not in line with the usual American policy.
“When you stop people at sea in international waters, or in your own waters, you announce that you’re going to board the ship and you’re looking for contraband, smuggling or drugs. This happens every day off of Miami,” Paul said on October 19th on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “We know from Coast Guard statistics that about 25 percent of the time the Coast Guard boards a ship, there are no drugs. So if our policy now is to blow up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running, that would be a bizarre world in which 25 percent of the people are probably innocent.”
Paul made a similar statement in an October 12th interview.
More than 30 people have been killed so far in the strikes, and the Trump administration has provided no evidence that the vessels contained drugs. We rated Trump’s recent statement that each strike saved “25,000 American lives” false.
Paul’s office pointed PolitiFact to the American Coast Guard’s 2024 fiscal year report, which said that year the agency intercepted drugs in about 73 percent of cases when they boarded boats, with about 27 percent of vessel interceptions yielding no drugs.
Experts said the data supports Paul’s point, but noted that it’s unclear how the Coast Guard defines the term it uses to describe intercepting drugs – “a drug disruption”.
“If the (Coast Guard) boards a vessel and finds a known drug trafficker but no drugs, and that individual gets arrested and convicted, does that count as a ‘drug disruption’?” said Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher. “Or suppose they approach the vessel, it jettisons the drugs overboard, and so the Coast Guard seizes the vessel but the drugs have disappeared into the water. Is that a successful disruption?”
Paul’s figure might not translate directly to the recent boat strikes, experts said, since the American regime might have had intelligence about those specific vessels.
The Coast Guard was contacted about its data collection process but did not respond.
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