(CNN) — The US military conducted lethal strikes against two boats in the eastern Pacific this week, killing all people on board each vessel, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The two strikes on vessels in the Pacific — the eighth and ninth known strikes by the US military on alleged drug-smuggling vessels since the start of September — appear to mark an expansion of the US military campaign, with all seven previous strikes targeting boats in the Caribbean Sea.

At least 37 people in total have been killed in the nine strikes, officials have said.

“Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,” Hegseth said on X Wednesday, noting a Tuesday strike in the Pacific had killed both people on board.

Hegseth said the boat in that strike was “being operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific” and “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route, and carrying narcotics.”

Later Wednesday, Hegseth said the US conducted a lethal strike on a second suspected drug boat in the eastern Pacific, killing all three people on board.

“Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out yet another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO),” Hegseth wrote in the post.

The secretary added that no US forces were hurt in the two Pacific strikes and compared the traffickers to al Qaeda.

“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people. There will be no refuge or forgiveness—only justice,” he wrote in his first post.

The Trump administration has produced a classified legal opinion seeking to justify lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, CNN has reported.

The opinion is significant, legal experts previously told CNN, because it treats drug traffickers as enemy combatants who can be summarily killed without any kind of judicial review.

The US struck at least two other vessels last week in the Caribbean, one of which did not kill everyone on board. Rather than hold two survivors detained by the US Navy after one of those strikes, the US repatriated the survivors back to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.

The situation was potentially going to set up a legal and policy dilemma for the administration because it was unclear what legal authority the US military would be able to cite to detain them indefinitely.

This story and headline have been updated with additional reporting.

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