“Don’t let them make you break the law,” read new digital billboards on expressways near U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Doral, Florida, where the U.S. military’s ongoing operations in the Caribbean Sea are being overseen.
The billboards were put up in response to the ongoing military strikes ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration, in what the White House and Pentagon have described as a concerted campaign against “narcoterrorists.”
The veterans behind the billboards at Win Without War and About Face: Veterans Against The War, describe it differently, calling them “ongoing lawless strikes on boats near the South American coasts.”
The billboards are part of a very public pressure campaign run by veterans at the two organizations in response to the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the military — the increasing use of the National Guard for domestic policing and an active duty force build-up in the Caribbean of nearly 10,000 troops, warships, guided missile destroyers, surveillance aircraft, and drones.
Over the last few months, the Pentagon has also carried out at least 11 deadly strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean for reasons that defense officials have said are to “dismantle transnational criminal organizations” and to “counter narcoterrorism.”
Top Stories This Week
In a post on X on Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced U.S. strikes on four vessels that were “trafficking narcotics” in the Eastern Pacific, killing 14 and leaving one survivor.
“The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own,” Hegseth wrote.
The new billboards are designed to inform troops of legal resources as the Pentagon shows a “misuse of the military,” and has troops carry out orders they may see as “unlawful and unconstitutional,” said Harrison Mann, the associate director for policy and campaigns for Win Without War and a former Army major who resigned amid U.S. military support for Israel during the Biden Administration.
“The reason you could say this is more alarming is that the [U.S. Southern Command] strikes, I think, represent the most blatantly illegal act that this administration has had the military carry out,” Mann said.
The legality and authorization of the Pentagon’s strikes have been called into question by members of Congress and legal experts who have pointed out the lack of transparency on justifications for the military campaign and gray areas around legal ramifications for troops involved in it. The strikes also received condemnation from John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who authored the controversial “Torture Memos” for the George W. Bush administration during the War on Terror.
After “contentious military operations,” under President Barack Obama, for instance, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2018, the Department of Justice released legal justifications. But the current administration has yet to do that for the Caribbean, according to a Just Security blog post by Mark Nevitt, former Navy lawyer and law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Sarah Harrison, a former Department of Defense attorney.
Brittany Ramos DeBarros, organizing director for About Face: Veterans Against The War, who is leading the campaign, said in her experience as a soldier deployed to Afghanistan, the recent strikes are an “obvious violation” of the military doctrine she was taught.
“When I was deployed, you had to have, what we call a positive ID on someone who wasn’t just identified as a potential enemy, but was actively attacking you in order to return fire,” DeBarros said. “Maybe to do interdiction or to search the vessel, or something like that, would be more within reasonable rules of engagement for a situation like that, but to just jump straight to lethal strikes is shocking.”
In recent months, the groups put up standing billboards with messages on National Guard deployments outside of two of the largest bases in North Carolina — the Army’s Fort Bragg and the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune — as well as a mobile billboard they drove through Washington, D.C.
The groups have put up billboards with similar messages in Chicago, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee, where legal battles are unfolding between local elected officials and at the Supreme Court.
Since the billboards have gone up, DeBarros said she’s hearing from National Guardsmen who are preparing to deny mobilization orders, as troops did in California and are preparing to do so in Chicago. Many of those cases so far, DeBarros said, are being handled administratively.
