Judge Orders the Pentagon to Show the Secret Memo Behind the Boat Strikes

The legal memo behind one of the Trump administration’s most contested military campaigns is going to a judge’s desk. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered the Pentagon and the Justice Department to turn over the secret memo that justifies the U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, so he can decide whether the public should see it.

The 66-page ruling in Manhattan federal court rejected most of the government’s reasons for withholding the document. Engelmayer, appointed by President Barack Obama, threw out the administration’s claims that attorney-client privilege and the deliberative process privilege allowed it to keep the entire memo hidden. The government also invoked the presidential communications privilege; on that, the judge said the record was not complete enough to rule, and ordered officials to say who has seen the memo and how it has been used.

The memo was written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in September 2025. The Defense Department began striking boats the month before, in August 2025, under a presidential directive authorizing military action against “foreign criminal groups.” The administration says the boats were carrying drugs bound for the United States.

Engelmayer found the government cannot have it both ways. Administration officials have repeatedly pointed to the memo in public as the legal basis for the strikes, and the Pentagon has adopted it as its “working law” — the policy its commanders follow. “The assembled record compellingly supports the finding that DOD — the agency that asserts disclosure authority over the Memo — has treated the Memo as its effective law and policy governing the boat strikes,” he wrote.

The suit was filed in December 2025 by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Constitutional Rights under the Freedom of Information Act, after the Defense Department withheld the memo in full. The lawsuit says at least 234 people have been killed in the strikes, and the government has not publicly produced conclusive evidence that every boat struck was smuggling drugs. The same two organizations also sued separately on behalf of two families from Trinidad and Tobago whose relatives died in a strike.

The order does not make the memo public. It sends the document to the judge for in-camera review — a private review by the judge alone — with the government given until Oct. 14 to comply. Some portions are likely to stay redacted on national security grounds. But Engelmayer wrote that it is all but certain that much of the memo’s legal analysis falls outside those protections.

The ACLU called the ruling a major step toward accountability. “The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians,” said Jeffrey Stein, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, calling the memo “secret law.” The administration has defended the campaign as a lawful fight against drug trafficking and has said the memo confirms it.