When two alleged drug traffickers survived a U.S. military strike last week in the Caribbean, they left the Trump administration with a decision to make: send them back home, or find a way to keep them detained.

The U.S. last month started a campaign of attacks in the Caribbean that the Trump administration has described as ¡°a non-international armed conflict¡± against narco-terrorism.

Yet legal experts aren¡¯t surprised that the U.S. government opted against using the term ¡°prisoners of war¡± to describe the two survivors of a Thursday attack by the U.S. military on a semisubmersible vessel.