Rand Paul Releases Coast Guard Data Showing 1 in 5 Boats Had No Drugs — Raising New Questions in Hegseth ‘Second-Strike’ Scandal
Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday released new Coast Guard data showing that roughly 20% of vessels boarded on suspicion of drug trafficking had no drugs on board in the year before the U.S. military carried out its now-controversial boat strikes in the Caribbean.
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The figure closely tracks with earlier publicly reported Coast Guard totals — including a 2024 report showing 27% of interdicted boats ended with zero drug seizures — and underscores what Paul says is a major risk in the military’s new approach: false positives.
The release comes as Pete Hegseth, who oversees the administration’s maritime strike campaign, faces bipartisan scrutiny over a deadly “second strike” in September. According to multiple reports, U.S. forces conducted an initial strike on a suspected narco-boat, then carried out a second attack after spotting survivors in the water — raising allegations of a possible war crime.
The Coast Guard data adds new fuel to the accountability debate. Unlike the military strikes, Coast Guard interdictions are non-lethal. Even when suspicion is high, crews board the vessels, search them, detain suspects if needed — and do not use lethal force when boats turn out to be clean.
Paul says the numbers show that suspicion alone is unreliable and that the administration’s policy of pre-emptive strikes risks killing innocent people.
He argues that if 1 in 5 Coast Guard boardings turn up empty, the military campaign’s assumption that “suspected traffickers” justify lethal force is fundamentally flawed.
The Coast Guard data is aggregated and does not include boat-by-boat details, leaving unanswered:
How many “empty boats” were truly innocent?
How often were drugs likely jettisoned before boarding?
Did the military strikes rely on intelligence strong enough to meaningfully reduce the false-positive risk?
The Pentagon has not released evidence that the struck vessels carried drugs, and lawmakers from both parties say the shifting explanations from Hegseth have only intensified concerns.
Rand Paul’s newly released data doesn’t prove military wrongdoing — but it raises the statistical stakes. If suspicion-based operations routinely encounter “clean” vessels, then a lethal-first strategy with no public transparency amplifies the possibility of grave error.
And as investigations into the second strike continue, Paul’s records are likely to become a key pressure point as Congress weighs how the administration is wielding force on the open water.