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According to Donald Trump, president of the United States, recent military strikes on five Venezuelan boats have saved “at least 100, 000 lives” due to their deterrent to drug smuggling.

At a press conference held on October 15th, President Donald Trump stated that “every boat that we knock out saves 25, 000 American lives, so every time you see a boat and you feel bad, you say, “Oh, that’s rough,” but it’s also rough if you lose three people and save 25, 000 people.

The administration did not provide documentation that the boats had drugs in them. Venezuela’s role in the US drug trade is understated, according to drug experts, according to PolitiFact. The strike’s legality is also a mystery. Some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was against international maritime law or human rights laws and that it amounted to a direct assault on US forces after the first attack in early September.

Trump has repeatedly used the figure, and he also asserts that similar land-based strikes are possible.

In a speech to US Navy sailors on October 5, Trump said, “Everyone of those boats is responsible for the deaths of 25, 000 American people and the destruction of families.” What we’re doing is actually an act of kindness, according to the article.

Trump stated on October 7 that “we’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs,” saying that “the water drugs – the drugs that enter through water – are not coming,” that “there are no boats any longer, to be honest, there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there, period.” By removing those boats, we have probably saved at least 100,000 lives, including those in the United States and Canada.

Trump’s statement is inconsistent in many ways.

Drug experts have told PolitiFact that there is no way to find out how many lives have been saved as a result of drug interception efforts.

Additionally, if Trump’s claim had been accurate, the deaths of five boats in less than two months would have saved nearly twice as many lives as drug overdose deaths annually.

No evidence has been presented by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration hasn’t specified what kind of drug or quantity was on the ships that were struck. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate how many deadly doses could have been eliminated.

Trump claimed that fentanyl was being transported aboard the boats at the media conference on October 15.

Trump said, “And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean.” It’s similar to carrying bags. It can be found everywhere.

No bags of drugs are visible in the videos, which he shared, shared, and shared with others about some of the boat strikes on Truth Social.

Additionally, Mexico, not Venezuela, is the source of the majority of fentanyl in the US. According to the US Sentencing Commission, it enters the country primarily through the southern border at authorized ports of entry, and it is mostly smuggled in by Americans.

Trump’s statement is mathematically dubious, even if there was fentanyl aboard.

If the boats each had 25 000 lethal doses, that doesn’t mean that the strikes prevented the deaths of 125, 000 drug overdose victims.

The supply chain partially replaces lost drugs when drugs are seized, according to John Caulkins, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who works on drug policy, PolitiFact.

According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose drug deaths have been declining for the past few years. Before there have been any strikes on boats off Venezuelan waters, these figures are outdated.

More than 73, 000 deaths occurred between May 2024 and April 2025, according to the CDC. For Trump to be accurate, 125 000 deaths from overdoses on five boats would have been caused by the drugs, nearly twice as many as in a year.

How many overdose deaths were prevented, according to data from drug intercept, but that is unknown.

Trump is not the first to attribute the saving of lives to drug enforcement. We’ve fact-checked, spoken with, and influenced politicians over the years when they claimed a certain number of seizures at the US border would kill a certain number of people or that those seizures would save a certain number of lives.

The politicians we fact-checked frequently referenced fentanyl seizures. The majority of US overdose deaths are caused by synthetic opioids. The lethal dose of fentanyl, two milligrams, is used to support politicians’ claims about saved lives. For instance, if authorities seize 10 milligrams of fentanyl, according to politicians, that would save five lives.

Because a person’s height, weight, and tolerance from previous exposures can affect a dose’s lethality, according to drug experts, there are some caveats in this calculation. And how many drugs enter the country don’t get taken into account according to statistics about how many were prevented from entering the country.

Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a Johns Hopkins University health policy expert, told PolitiFact in May, “We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted.”

Our decision

Trump remarked that “every boat that we knock out saves 25, 000 American lives” in relation to the boat strikes off Venezuela’s coast.

Trump claimed that drugs were being transported to the US from the five boats that the US military attacked off Venezuelan coast. However, Venezuelan experts told PolitiFact that the nation only participates in the US drug trafficking.

No documentation is available from the administration regarding the quantity or type of drugs claimed to be present on the ships. Due to the lack of information, how many lethal doses of the drug could have been eliminated.

Even though the boats each had 25 000 lethal drug doses, 125 000 lives were saved by destroying them. There were 73, 000 US drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That would have resulted in 125 000 deaths, nearly twice as many as US overdose deaths in a year, from the drugs used on the five boats.

How many lives have been saved, according to the number of drugs that have been stopped from entering the US.

A New York jury has found that French banking giant BNP Paribas’s work in Sudan helped to prop up the regime of former ruler Omar al-Bashir, making it liable for atrocities that took place under his rule.

The eight-member jury on Friday sided with three plaintiffs originally from Sudan, awarding a total of $20.75m in damages, after hearing testimony describing horrors committed by Sudanese soldiers and the Popular Defence Forces, the government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed.

The plaintiffs – two men and one woman, all now American citizens – told the federal court in Manhattan that they had been tortured, burned with cigarettes, slashed with a knife, and, in the case of the woman, sexually assaulted.

“I have no relatives left,” Entesar Osman Kasher told the court.

The trial focused on whether BNP Paribas’s financial services were a “natural and adequate cause” of the harm suffered by survivors of ethnic cleansing and mass violence in Sudan.

A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said in a statement to the AFP news agency that the ruling “is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict”.

Bobby DiCello, who represented the plaintiffs, called the verdict “a victory for justice and accountability”.

“The jury recognised that financial institutions cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions,” DiCello said.

“Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fuelled by US dollars, that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped,” he said.

BNP Paribas “has supported the ethnic cleansing and ruined the lives of these three survivors”, DiCello said during closing remarks on Thursday.

The French bank, which did business in Sudan from the late 1990s until 2009, provided letters of credit that allowed Sudan to honour import and export commitments.

The plaintiffs argued that these assurances enabled the regime to keep exporting cotton, oil and other commodities, enabling it to receive billions of dollars from buyers that helped finance its operations.

Defence lawyer Dani James argued, “There’s just no connection between the bank’s conduct and what happened to these three plaintiffs.”

The lawyer for BNP Paribas also said the French bank’s operations in Sudan were legal in Europe and that global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) partnered with the Sudanese government during the same period.

Defence lawyers also claimed that the bank had no knowledge of human rights violations occurring at that time.

The plaintiffs would have “had their injuries without BNP Paribas”, said lawyer Barry Berke.

“Sudan would and did commit human rights crimes without oil or BNP Paribas,” Berke said.

The verdict followed a five-week jury trial conducted by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who last year denied a request by BNP Paribas to get the case thrown out ahead of trial.

Hellerstein wrote in his decision last year that there were facts showing a relationship between BNP Paribas’s banking services and abuses perpetrated by the Sudanese government.

BNP Paribas had in 2014 agreed to plead guilty and pay an $8.97bn penalty to settle US charges it transferred billions of dollars for Sudanese, Iranian and Cuban entities subject to economic sanctions.

The US government recognised the Sudanese conflict as a genocide in 2004. The war claimed some 300,000 lives between 2002 and 2008 and displaced 2.5 million people, according to the United Nations.

Al-Bashir, who led Sudan for three decades, was ousted and detained in April 2019 following months of protests in Sudan.

He is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on genocide charges.

In the months that followed al-Bashir’s ousting in 2019, army generals agreed to share power with civilians, but that ended in October 2021, when the leader of the army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, seized control in a coup.