Senator Rand Paul saying that 21 percent of boats stopped off the coast of Venezuela had no drugs on board, and he used that to suggest the United States is killing innocent fishermen. That framing leaves out almost everything that actually matters.
1st
If 21 percent were “clean,” then 79 percent were not. In any law-enforcement or military environment, a seventy-nine percent hit rate is extremely high. That alone undercuts the idea that these operations are “mostly” hitting innocent people.
2nd
An empty boat is not proof that a crew is innocent. Smugglers on these routes use fast open-hull boats. They dump their load the moment they spot a helicopter or aircraft. They also hand off bundles to another boat before contact. By the time an interdiction team boards, the hull can look clean even when it wasn’t ten minutes earlier. This is common practice on cocaine routes in the Caribbean and eastern Venezuela.
3rd
Paul’s statistic comes from classic chase-and-board cases. That is not the same thing as the current deep-surveillance strikes. Traditional chases always miss a portion of traffickers because dumping and handoffs are built into the smuggling playbook. The new system uses long-duration drone surveillance, pattern-of-life analysis, and multiple intelligence streams before any shot is taken. Treating boarding numbers as equivalent to strike targeting is misleading.
4th
The hard numbers from this past year tell the real story.The United States Coast Guard announced a record seizure of roughly five hundred ten thousand pounds of cocaine in Fiscal Year 2025. It is the largest annual total in the agency’s history and more than triple its long-term average. That increase lines up with the period when the expanded interdiction effort began.
5th
These routes are not run by hobby fishermen. They move hundreds of tons of cocaine a year and are controlled by cartel and gang networks tied to violence, extortion, and human trafficking. That is the reality on the water. A narrow statistic pulled from fourteen boardings does not change the scale or the nature of the threat.
Bottom line
Paul’s post uses a small sample from one type of operation to paint a much larger mission as reckless. The full set of facts shows something very different. The United States is hitting confirmed trafficking routes, using deeper surveillance than ever before, and seizing record amounts of narcotics. The 21 percent number does not prove what Paul says it proves. It proves the opposite.