The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Justice Department seeking to obtain a classified legal opinion it said the White House used to justify lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers.
The ACLU’s move comes as pressure intensifies on the Pentagon to reveal further details about the strikes, due to concerns that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth lacked sufficient evidence that those targeted on multiple boats headed to the United States from the South American region were “narco-terrorists.”
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” ACLU attorney Jeffrey Stein said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The ACLU, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union, is suing to obtain a memo from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that “apparently blesses the ongoing strikes as lawful acts.”
“According to news accounts, the memo also purports to immunize personnel who authorized or took part in these unlawful strikes from future criminal prosecution for what would otherwise simply be homicides,” a press release from the ACLU reads.
The ACLU had previously sought to obtain the memo through a Freedom of Information Act request in October, but said this week that the government had failed to release the records.
Stein called the strikes “illegal and immoral,” saying that Hegseth and other officials who authorized the military to carry out operations targeting the suspected drug boats “must be held accountable.”
The same day the ACLU sued the Trump administration, Hegseth and other senior national security officials were expected to head to Capitol Hill to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the controversial strikes.
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In addition, Hegseth could be required to submit the unedited footage of all boat strikes conducted against suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean Sea or else face travel budget cuts, according to language included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2026.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department was also hit with a request from a coalition of former federal ethics officials requesting an internal DOJ investigation into the legal opinion justifying the strikes. The ethics counsels for former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were among the bipartisan group that sent a request to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility calling for an “immediate investigation,” according to CBS News.