Independent
Seventy-one strikes, one by one
Each column is one announcement, and each mark is one person. Filled marks are the confirmed dead. Rings are people who survived a strike and were never found. Tap a strike to see what the government said and what is known.
Regions are as the announcing official stated them. Six announcements named no sea; the New York Times tracker places five of them in the Caribbean and one in the Pacific. The Oct 27, 2025 announcement covered three strikes on four boats; every other column is one strike per boat.
Dead and never found, by month of strike
No strike was announced between June 21 and Aug 23, 2026, a 63-day pause with no official explanation.
238 people. Thirteen identified.
The US government has not named anyone it has killed. A government or a family has publicly identified 13 of the dead, and three survivors are known to be alive. Everyone else is unknown to the public.
Every person, one mark each
Identified on record, by country
Why counts differ
TMI's count was built strike by strike from official announcements and checked against every independent tracker we could read. The differences come from who is counted: the US-announced dead only, or also survivors who were never found.
Video, and nothing else
Every announcement came with a strike video. No announcement named the people killed or showed what the boats carried. The list of groups the US says it is targeting has not been published.
What the government says
What is independently known
Strikes where families or governments dispute the official account
The second strike
The first strike killed nine of the 11 people aboard. A follow-up strike killed the two survivors, on the order of the admiral then leading Joint Special Operations Command, Frank Bradley. He now heads US Special Operations Command.
What lawmakers who saw the video said
The Washington Post reported, from one person with direct knowledge: "The order was to kill everybody." Hegseth called it "fake news," and Bradley told lawmakers there was no such order. Both Republican committee chairs closed their inquiries in December 2025. In May 2026 the Pentagon inspector general opened its own review of targeting across the whole campaign. It has published no findings.
A secret memo, and a deadline
The administration says the US is in an armed conflict with drug cartels and is acting in self-defense. Its legal reasoning sits in a classified Justice Department opinion. A federal judge has ordered the government to hand that memo over for his review. The government is contesting a second demand, for a sworn list of everyone who has had access to it.
The administration's case
The critics
Every vote to stop or limit the strikes
Blue: votes for limiting the strikes. The white line marks half.
Congress has never authorized the strikes. Two senators switched on Jan 14 after, they said, Rubio assured them the president would seek approval before sending troops into Venezuela.
What Americans say depends on the question
Share supporting or approving. No poll asking specifically about the boat strikes has been found since January 2026.
The drug question
The cargo on these sea routes is mainly cocaine. Fentanyl, involved in about half of US overdose deaths, comes mainly by land across the southwest border, according to the DEA. Overdose deaths were falling steeply before the first strike.
US overdose deaths, 12 months ending each month
CDC provisional, predicted values, through April 2026. Categories overlap: many cocaine deaths also involve fentanyl. These data cannot show any effect of the strikes, and the decline began well before them.
What officials claim
What the data show
Neighbors and allies
The strikes came alongside the capture of Venezuela's president. Colombia's new government now backs them. Mexico objects, and France says the strikes violate international law.
Allies and international bodies
How we got here
From the first terrorist designations in February 2025 to this week. Filter by who acted.
What the record can't settle yet
Where credible sources disagree, and what would settle each question.
How we built this
Method
The ledger has one row per public announcement, built from SOUTHCOM releases (read through Internet Archive copies, because southcom.mil blocks automated access) and from officials' posts as quoted by news outlets and Airwars. Every strike was checked against at least two independent trackers. "Confirmed" means the event and the official count were reported independently. It does not mean anyone has verified that drugs were aboard. No such verification exists for any strike.
Survivors who were never found are counted as presumed dead, as AP and Airwars do. Statements from Washington, from other governments and from independent reporting are labeled separately.
What we leave out
This page shows strikes by region only, because the government has not said where they happened more precisely. It names no one killed; the 13 identifications are counted by country. It carries no weapons or targeting detail.
Overdose data: CDC NCHS provisional counts, pulled Oct 8, 2026. Map: Natural Earth.