Meet the Man Who Led Trump's Murder of 11 People
Admiral Holsey is the commander of the U.S. Southern Command and obeyed an unlawful command from the commander in chief
Military officers have a sworn duty to defy unlawful orders.
So far, however, details of last week’s unlawful military killing of 11 people remain sketchy. Drone? Missile fired by air or by sea?
What we do know is that the Caribbean, and Venezuela, are part of U.S. Southern Command, the U.S. military region overseen by U.S. Navy Admiral Alvin Holsey. And it appears that Holsey complied with whatever unlawful orders — from Pres. Donald Trump on down — led to the killing of 11 people outside a combat zone. And yet, Holsey has been virtually invisible in media coverage of this shocking action.
According to Military Religious Freedom Foundation President and Founder Mikey Weinstein, an Air Force veteran and Reagan administration alum, “If the Admiral felt that was ‘an illegal order’ he is required to NOT follow it.”
Weinstein added, however, that “it’s a very high bar to prove something like that.” And if Holsey “refused on that basis and could not succeed in proving on the merits that it was an illegal order he could face felony prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
That’s why it’s essential to put legal consequences on their radar if they do comply with an illegal order. That threat actually helps members of the military looking for rationales to uphold the law and the Constitution. But politicians have barely raised that prospect, even as they decry illegal orders and unconstitutional military deployments.
And, so far, the administration itself hasn’t mustered a legitimate rationale for Holsey to order the Tuesday strike in the Caribbean, nor an explanation for how it didn’t constitute an unlawful order to, in any reasonable sense of the word, murder 11 people.
The U.S. was not returning fire. There was no war or even combat. The dead were given no chance to surrender. They had no due process in which to mount a legal defense.
And administration officials appear indifferent to the obligations that are supposed to bind them and Holsey.
Vice President JD Vance responded to the claim that it was a war crime by saying, presumably honestly, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Asked what legal authority the military had for the strike, Vance, a Yale Law alum, said falsely, “The legal authority … is that there are people who are bringing — literal terrorists — who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
Also asked what legal authority the strike had, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said falsely, “We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that: First of all just the defense of the American people alone.” (The victims were hundreds of miles from the U.S., it’s not clear that they were headed to the U.S. and they carried no apparent weapons. Self-defense has never justified the U.S. government killing suspects for alleged trafficking of drugs.)
The Pentagon reportedly had no legal basis for killing those 11 people before doing it and the day afterward was still trying to come up with one.
Even in his official notice to the Senate regarding the killings, Trump cited no law or treaty that gave the U.S. the right to blow up 11 people in international waters. Although Trump in his post announcing the strike said the dead had been “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” his letter two days later told a different story:
“United States forces struck a vessel … assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”
That’s even less legal. Guilt by affiliation is not a capital offense.
Rubio first said the vessel was bound for Trinidad. Then he said the U.S. was the destination.
Further undermining administration claims that this was legal, let alone necessary, Undersecretary of State Christopher Landau said last month that the U.S. would be sending messages. Which is neither self-defense, nor justifiable homicide.
In a podcast appearance with Donald Trump, Jr., Landau said, "I think you'll be seeing more actions in the coming days and weeks that will be sending messages."
On Aug. 27, 2025, U.S. Southern Command, SOUTHCOM, surged eight ships to the Caribbean and Pacific, with Venezuela in their sights. That was after thousands of Marines and sailors were dispatched for “special operations.”
On Aug. 29, Rubio went to Doral, FL, to meet with Holsey at SOUTHCOM headquarters, “to discuss security in Latin America and the Caribbean and U.S. priorities in our region.”
Holsey ought to have been able to sniff out the gun being loaded in search of a target. But even if he didn’t, his training would have included the legal prerequisites for deadly military force. Against civilians. Off the battlefield. Outside any declared combat. Offensive. Without giving a chance to surrender — as the U.S. Coast Guard, under Holsey, did routinely with suspected drug vessels up until last week.
Holsey’s biography says he was:
“…inaugural commander of the International Maritime Security Construct / Coalition Task Force Sentinel rapidly setting up an expeditionary headquarters to ensure freedom of navigation, international law, free flow of commerce and stability of maritime commons throughout the Middle East.”
Protecting international law and ensuring freedom of navigation requires one to know the laws and military code that Trump directed SOUTHCOM to violate. Hell, two Defense Department officials told the New York Times the attack didn’t meet legal standards.
Officials are already warning of more such attacks — abandoning the pretext of self-defense. If anything, last month’s buildup and last week’s attack now look like nothing so much as incitement of a coup, “inching toward regime change,” winking at the possibility of U.S. military assistance to encourage dissidents to take up arms against the Venezuelan regime.
If the 11 dead really were drug-runners in Tren de Aragua, according to Trump’s narrative that means they’re part of a group engaged in covert destabilization of the U.S. But if that’s the case, why not capture and interrogate them for valuable intel on their puppet masters in the Maduro regime?
Holsey ought to have been aware, if only from reading the news, that this administration has racked up a terrible record of being wrong about the people it accuses. Kidnappings have been based on tattoos.
One former federal law-enforcement official gave the New York Times all kinds of ways Trump’s story doesn’t add up. They concluded it was more likely a case of human trafficking.
Why, if it was drug trafficking, put so many people on a boat you could otherwise fill with drugs? (Which, by the way, likely weren’t deadly. Tren de Aragua’s specialty is pink cocaine, an hallucinogenic made from ketamine and ecstatsy.)
The day after the illegal strike, a federal judge found that the Trump administration didn’t have enough facts to back up its claim of a covert Venezuelan invasion.
The senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), said of the attack that there is a “question of its legality and constitutionality,” but it’s actually not a question. No one, not even the administration, can cite a single statute or legal principle making it legal, let alone constitutional.
And yet, who’s talking about consequences?
It’s possible that Trump’s order might have given Holsey pause if Democrats had gone on record previously warning of consequences for “just following orders” that are illegal. And yet, as I wrote months ago, Trump’s military of invasion of Los Angeles, too, prompted no such warnings.
Gen. Gregory Guillot is the commander of U.S. Northern Command. He oversaw the military incursion into an American city premised, the Homeland (sic) Security secretary said, on liberating it from elected, “socialist” leaders.
That action has since been found to have been illegal. But even that hasn’t prompted America’s opposition leaders to put military leaders on notice about obeying the law and military guidelines.
If they had, you can bet Holsey would have known about it. And possibly thought twice before relaying Trump’s order.
(Only recently have state and local Democrats begun to threaten legal accountability for illegal domestic military actions.)
What Holsey might very well not have known — if only because Democrats and the media have largely ignored it — is Rubio’s long history of choosing authoritarianism over democracy in Latin America.
As I revealed several years ago, Rubio was an instrumental player in a covert campaign involving the Fellowship Foundation — the National Prayer Breakfast people — to protect an evangelical Guatemalan president from charges of corruption, including cheating to win his election.
As I wrote before Trump took office in January, The Fellowship was also a key part of Rubio’s networking with wealthy Latin American elites eager to shape U.S. policy to favor their business interests, and the authoritarian governments in which they would thrive.
Rubio’s been claiming since at least 2018 that Venezuela is a threat to the region. And while international observers say Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stole his election last year, it’s Maduro’s socialist politics that piss off Rubio and Trump.
As Atlantic Council researcher and Senior Fellow Geoff Ramsey told Bloomberg, “Rubio has been a constant advocate for a harder line in US policy towards Latin America, and he’s certainly using his new position to advance that approach.”
It’s easy — especially given media neglect — to overlook the role of Christian extremism in driving U.S. foreign policy. But wealthy evangelical Americans have spent decades tilting Latin America from Catholicism toward Protestantism.
And in a meeting with Holsey on Aug. 25, 2025, Paraguayan President Santiago Peña said the friendship between those two nations comes from the shared values of the Declaration of Independence, but also “our unshakeable Christian roots.”
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
Once again, TFN is the only place where you will find a detailed account of this atrocity—day in, and day out, incredible reporting that beats everyone. That's why I'm a paid subscriber. I NEED this information to effectively resist this rogue administration.
A deeply-troubling read, but I thank you, JL.