The U.S. Coast Guard pulled at least 16 people from the Pacific Ocean off Baja California in the predawn hours Friday during a US Coast Guard Baja Rescue. Authorities kept searching for several others after the rescue, which began with a report of a vessel in distress around 1 a.m.
Chris Sappey, a petty officer, said rescuers found people floating about 140 miles west of Ensenada. “There was no sight of a vessel in the water, just straight people in the water,” he said.
San Diego hospitals
The rescued people were taken to San Diego hospitals after the operation. Janice Collins, a spokesperson for Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego, said three rescued people were taken there, including one with a suspected shark bite and two with cold exposure.
The Coast Guard and U.S. Navy were helping Mexican authorities with two helicopters, a fixed-wing plane and a cutter. The search was taking place in an area frequented by smugglers transporting migrants by boat to the U.S., where small boats called pangas leave Baja in the dead of night and sometimes travel hundreds of miles north.
Questions after Friday
One rescued person said as many as 27 people had been on board, but authorities had not said how many were actually on the boat. That gap leaves the search focused on how many remain in the water and how many were already pulled out before the first aircraft reached the scene.
The rescue fits a pattern of maritime smuggling accidents off the California coast. In May of 2025, at least three people died when a panga flipped off the coast about 35 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, and in 2023 eight people were killed when two boats approached a San Diego beach in heavy fog and one capsized in the surf.
