Evening Brief: Border Patrol Shooting, Trump Administration Sued by Caribbean Family, Top Chinese General Ousted

Trump’s “Drug Boat” War Just Met Its First Wrongful Death Lawsuit Two families from Trinidad and Tobago have now put the Trump White House where it never wanted to be: in the dock, answering for a missile strike on a small, nameless fishing boat off Venezuela’s coast. The story starts on 14 October 2025, in that gray no-man’s-land of the Caribbean where the map says “high seas” and Washington calls it a battlespace.  A U.S. aircraft or drone — the intel on this is cagey  — put a precision-guided munition into a wooden boat carrying six men headed toward Las Cuevas, Trinidad, killing everyone aboard. Two of the dead, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were exactly the sort of people government officials like to call “collateral damage” when they belong to someone else. They family states they were merely fishermen and farm workers hustling work in Venezuela and hitching a ride home. On Truth Social, the same day as the strike, Donald Trump posted footage of a boat being blown apart, bragging that, “under my Standing Authorities,” his Secretary of War had ordered a lethal strike on a vessel allegedly tied to a “Designated Terrorist Organization” running drugs in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. That little victory lap may end up as Exhibit A.   Family of men killed in Caribbean boat strike sue over ‘wrongful deaths’https://t.co/Q11NFY4Yoj pic.twitter.com/TeUx2Hcd2V — The Washington Times (@WashTimes) January 27, 2026 Civil-rights lawyers from outfits like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU took the case into federal court in Boston, framing it as the first wrongful death action to come out of a three‑dozen‑strike campaign against drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. They’re reaching for every legal lever available: the Death on the High Seas Act, to argue classic maritime wrongful death; the Alien Tort Statute, to claim extrajudicial killing in violation of international law; and the basic laws of armed conflict, which require an actual armed conflict before you start killing people from a distance by remote control. The suit’s theory is blunt: there is no congressionally authorized war with drug cartels, drug smugglers are not an “organized armed group” under the laws of war, and civilians who don’t pose a concrete, specific, imminent threat don’t become fair game just because someone in D.C. slaps the word “terrorist” on their ride. In plain English, the complaint says these weren’t lawful kills — they were murders, ordered at the top and executed down the chain, dressed up after the fact as counter-narcotics. Yes, we’ve all heard this before, and for some time now. If the court buys even part of the family’s argument, this quiet little case out of Trinidad’s fishing community may become something much bigger: the moment a drug war that went to sea finally ran aground on the rule of law. China’s Top General Falls Under Xi’s Relentless Purge China’s most powerful uniformed officer, General Zhang Youxia, has just gone from Xi Jinping’s trusted enforcer to the latest high‑profile casualty of Beijing’s never‑ending anti‑corruption crusade. Zhang, the vice‑chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and effectively China’s top general, is now under investigation for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”, the stock phrase Beijing uses when a senior figure is about to be taken down. For readers tracking PLA leadership, Zhang wasn’t some faceless apparatchik. He was one of the few remaining Chinese generals with real combat experience, a veteran of the 1979 Sino‑Vietnamese war, and the son of a famed founding general. That revolutionary bloodline, combined with decades of service, made him a natural ally for Xi as the Chinese leader tightened his grip over the military. Xi trusted him enough to keep him on past the usual retirement age, a rare exception in a system obsessed with seniority and age limits. That all came crashing down when the Ministry of National Defense quietly announced the probe. Zhang isn’t falling alone. General Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department, is also under investigation. Together, they sit at the apex of the PLA’s command structure. Their simultaneous targeting sends a clear message through the ranks: nobody is untouchable, not even those closest to Xi. This is just the latest aftershock in a rolling purge that’s gutted the upper tiers of China’s armed forces. Defense ministers have disappeared, Rocket Force commanders have been dragged out, and an entire cohort of senior generals has been cashiered over the last two years. Officially, it’s about corruption, procurement scams, kickbacks, weapons programs that look better on paper than on a battlefield. Unofficially, it’s also about loyalty. Xi wants a modern, combat‑ready PLA that answers to him personally, with no competing centers of power. The irony is hard to miss. Zhang was one of the main guarantors of Xi’s control over the military, the guy you’d expect to be cleaning house, not being swept out with the trash. His fall suggests either that rot is deeper than Xi believed, or that the definition of “disloyalty” is getting ever tighter inside Zhongnanhai. For defense professionals, the takeaway is simple: the PLA is undergoing a violent internal shake‑up at the exact moment Beijing is trying to project strength from Taiwan to the South China Sea. On paper, purges are about discipline and readiness. In practice, they also create hesitation, fear, and second‑guessing in the command chain; exactly the kind of friction you don’t want when you’re planning for high‑end war.