In September 2025, the Trump administration sparked criticism after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered "kinetic strikes" on at least three boats carrying what he described as "narcoterrorists" with connections to the designated foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua, the country of Venezuela, or Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
"Kinetic" in warfare terms generally means using a non-explosive projectile that is dropped on a target at high speed to cause damage. In posts about the three strikes, Trump presented them as warnings to those seeking to traffic illegal drugs into the U.S. (archived, archived, archived). Various experts questioned the legality of the strikes under international law.
Though Trump's posts identified the 17 victims of the administration's strikes as "narcoterrorists," in late September 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that one of the people killed was actually a fisherman with four children who, according to his wife, "left one day for work and never came back."
For example, the Facebook page of the liberal media outlet Occupy Democrats posted, "BREAKING: AWFUL! Trump MURDERED a fisherman and father of four and smeared him as a terrorist!"
The claim appeared alongside references to a New York Times article about conditions in Venezuela after the strikes. According to that article, "In an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back."
The claim and the New York Times article circulated in English and Spanish on X (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and Bluesky (archived). Snopes readers wrote in, asking if the claim was true.
At the time of this writing, neither the U.S. nor Venezuelan government or news media had publicly identified the 17 people killed in the September strikes. Venezuela's Interior Minister and ruling party head Diosdado Cabello said on state TV after the first strike that none of the 11 people killed was a Tren de Aragua member. Cabello claimed investigators had spoken to people in the victims' towns (without naming those towns) who said "none were from Tren de Aragua, none were drug traffickers." Cabello did not say whether some victims might have been fishermen.
Given the anonymous nature of the interview in The New York Times, Snopes could not independently verify the alleged fisherman's wife's account. We did not find the reported interview or others like it featured elsewhere in searches of English or Spanish-language and Venezuelan media to corroborate the New York Times' account.
We reached out to Julie Turkewitz, the author of the New York Times report, to ask if she carried out the interview and, if so, how she verified the alleged fisherman's wife's identity. We also reached out to the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask whether it could confirm the information in Turkewitz's article and await a reply.
The New York Times article did not specify which boat strike allegedly killed the husband of the woman interviewed in its report. Trump posted about three separate strikes on Truth Social: one on Sept. 2, 2025, that killed 11 people; another on Sept. 15 that killed three people; and a third on Sept. 19 that killed three people.
According to The New York Times, the victims of the first boat strike that Trump announced on Sept. 2 were "widely believed" to be "from the towns of San Juan de Unare and Güiria, on a spit of land known as the Paria Peninsula," an area that the Associated Press (AP) described in a photo report as home to "impoverished fishing communities."
The attacks followed the deployment of several U.S. warships to the Caribbean that White House officials told Reuters would aim to address threats from cartels in the area. The U.S. Department of State classed Tren de Aragua, a cartel that originated in Venezuela, as a foreign terrorist organization. The U.S. Department of the Treasury also sanctioned Cartel de los Soles, a criminal group that the department claimed Maduro leads, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
According to reports by NBC and CNN in late September 2025 that cited unnamed U.S. officials, the Trump administration was reportedly considering striking cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Venezuela. Snopes does not rely on anonymous sources and could not independently verify these reports.
It remained unclear at the time of this writing whether the Trump administration would continue its campaign of strikes against suspected drug trafficking boats. Questions also persisted around the legality of the strikes themselves.