Judge Orders Pentagon to Hand Over Secret Legal Memo Justifying Deadly Boat Strikes
Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected two of the government's three secrecy claims and gave the Justice Department two weeks to submit the memo for his private review.
A federal judge in New York on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to submit to the court a secret Justice Department legal opinion that underpins the military's lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, rejecting most of the government's arguments for keeping it hidden.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, in a 66-page opinion, said he rejected two of the three privileges the Pentagon and Justice Department had invoked: the deliberative process privilege and the attorney-client privilege. "The court rejects the privilege claim with respect to two of the three privileges the agencies invoke," he wrote. The government has two weeks to give him the memo so he can read it himself.
The document is a September 2025 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights asked for it under the Freedom of Information Act in December 2025 and sued when it was not released.
Engelmayer found that executive branch officials had repeatedly cited the memo in public as the justification for the strikes. That, he wrote, meant the Pentagon was treating it as its "effective law and policy" governing the operations, which is what courts call "working law" and which is not shielded from disclosure the way ordinary legal advice is.
The strikes began on Sept. 2, 2025. According to the court filings and press accounts, the military has carried out about 70 lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific since then, killing more than 200 people. Officials say the targets were drug smugglers. The government has not publicly produced evidence in most cases that those killed were trafficking narcotics.
Engelmayer did not rule on a third claim, the presidential communications privilege. He said he will review the memo himself to decide whether that privilege applies before deciding whether any of it must be made public. That means the memo is not yet headed for release, and the administration can still argue that some or all of it must remain secret.
"The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians," said Jeffrey Stein, a lawyer with the ACLU, in a statement. The Pentagon has not said whether it will appeal.
The ruling arrives as Congress and the courts push for more detail on the campaign. Lawmakers of both parties have asked questions about the legal basis for striking boats rather than interdicting them, and for what the military knew about the people on board. A public version of the memo, if the judge eventually orders one, would be the first look at how the administration's lawyers reasoned that the strikes were lawful.
