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For Immediate Release
December, 27 2017, 02:15pm EDT
Contact:
Haley McKey
hmckey@defenders.org
202-772-0247
/ 571-480-2113
Trump Administration Rips Away Protection for Migratory Birds
The Trump administration is reportedly reversing the longstanding interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to exempt industry - including the oil and gas industry, powerlines and wind energy - from compliance with the United States' commitment under international agreements to protect migratory birds.
Statement from Bob Dreher, Defenders of Wildlife's senior vice president of conservation programs:
WASHINGTON
The Trump administration is reportedly reversing the longstanding interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to exempt industry - including the oil and gas industry, powerlines and wind energy - from compliance with the United States' commitment under international agreements to protect migratory birds.
Statement from Bob Dreher, Defenders of Wildlife's senior vice president of conservation programs:
"In yet another gift to big corporations, the Trump administration is carving a huge hole in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, allowing industries to kill birds with impunity. For generations, Americans have pledged to work with Canada and other nations to protect migratory birds. Defenders of Wildlife will fight to reverse the Trump administration's reckless and lawless act, and to restore the protections our migratory birds depend on for their survival."
Background:
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act enacted by Congress turns 100 next year, and has been read by federal agencies, the Department of Justice and the courts as protecting birds not just from unauthorized hunting but also from being trapped, poisoned or mangled by industrial operations. Migratory birds are increasingly threatened by land development, habitat loss and the effects of climate change.
Defenders of Wildlife is the premier U.S.-based national conservation organization dedicated to the protection and restoration of imperiled species and their habitats in North America.
(917) 363-4149LATEST NEWS
Yale Historian Warns Trump Is Putting US on Path to World War III
Historian Greg Grandin argued that Trump's foreign policy will likely result in "more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war."
Dec 16, 2025
Yale historian Greg Grandin believes that President Donald Trump's foreign policy is putting the US on a dangerous course that could lead to a new world war.
Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Grandin argued that the Trump administration seems determined to throw out the US-led international order that has been in place since World War II.
In its place, Grandin said, is "a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence," in which the US has undisputed control over the Western Hemisphere.
As evidence, he pointed to the Trump White House's recently published National Security Strategy that called for reviving the so-called Monroe Doctrine that in the past was used to justify US imperial aggression throughout Latin America, and that the Trump administration is using to justify its own military adventures in the region.
Among other things, Grandin said that the Trump administration has been carrying out military strikes against purported drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and has also been "meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela."
Most ominously, Grandin said, is how the US Department of Defense has been "carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela."
A large problem with dividing the globe into spheres controlled by major powers, Grandin continued, is that these powers inevitably come into violent conflict with one another.
Citing past statements and actions by the British Empire, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, Grandin argued that "as the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine."
This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the case of Trump, who, according to Grandin, sees Latin America "as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence, and end migration."
The result of this policy shift, Grandin concluded, "will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war."
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BBC Vows to Fight Trump's $10 Billion Lawsuit Over Documentary Editing
"This is about the BBC’s independence," said one former BBC official. "So they should definitely fight it."
Dec 16, 2025
The British Broadcasting Corporation vowed to fight back against President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit filed on Monday—the latest legal challenge brought by the president against a media organization over its coverage of him.
A spokesperson for the BBC said in a brief statement on Tuesday, "We will be defending this case" after Trump filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Florida, alleging that the network defamed him and violated the state's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act when it aired edited comments he made in a speech on January 6, 2021, just before thousands of his supporters attacked the US Capitol.
Before last year's presidential election, the BBC series Panorama aired a documentary titled "Trump: A Second Chance?" The film includes a section featuring Trump's speech to a crowd in Washington, DC on January 6, with two clips of him speaking about 50 minutes apart spliced together, making it appear as though he directly urged people to march to the Capitol.
With his lawsuit, Trump has suggested the edited clip created the impression that he incited violence—though several journalists have noted that those allegations predate the documentary. The edited clip received little attention until recent months when the right-wing Daily Telegraph published details from a memo by Michael Prescott, a former BBC standards adviser with links to the Conservative Party.
In the memo, Prescott took aim at the documentary's editing and alleged a "pro-transgender bias" and "anti-Israel bias"in the BBC's news coverage.
Trump's lawsuit cites the internal review mentioned in Prescott's memo, alleging “a string of incidents that demonstrate serious bias in the corporation’s reporting.”
The BBC has publicly apologized for the editing of the documentary, but has denied that Trump has a legitimate basis for a defamation claim.
The lawsuit is Trump's latest against a media company over coverage of him. At least two cases—against ABC and CBS and its parent company, Paramount, have ended in settlements, with the companies agreeing to pay the president $16 million each. He also has a defamation case pending against the New York Times.
On Monday, Trump gave a muddled explanation of his latest lawsuit while speaking to the press at the White House, falsely claiming the BBC was accused of using AI to make him say "things [he] never said" in the documentary.
"Trump is suing the BBC. He doesn’t know why. But he’s suing anyway," said BBC presenter Sangita Myska.
Trump: "I'm suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth ... I guess they used AI or something" pic.twitter.com/VxYMDp6oZ2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2025
Richard Tice, deputy leader of the right-wing Reform Party, expressed support for Trump's lawsuit on Tuesday and agreed with the push for "wholesale change" at the BBC. Christopher Ruddy of the Trump-aligned network Newsmax also told The Guardian that the BBC should "figure out a quick and easy settlement."
But on the network's "Today" program, former BBC Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer said that "it would be extremely damaging to the BBC’s reputation not to fight the case."
"This is about the BBC’s independence," said Damazer. "And, unlike American media organizations which have coughed up the money, the BBC doesn’t have commercial business interests that depend on President Trump’s beneficence in the White House. So they should definitely fight it."
"The BBC has likely an extremely strong case," he added. "The 1960s established a very wide margin of press freedom in a case called Sullivan v. The New York Times, from which the BBC would undoubtedly benefit... President Trump was not harmed by what the BBC mistakenly did in its Panorama edit. The program wasn’t shown in the United States. He was neither financially nor politically hurt, and the BBC should definitely fight this case."
Zoe Gardner, a researcher and commentator on migration policy in the UK, denounced "far-right politicians and pundits" for "cheering" Trump's lawsuit.
"Given the BBC is publicly funded, this is Donald Trump suing you and me," Gardner said. "It’s a pathetic cry-bully attack on journalism by a wannabe dictator and an attack on every British person."
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One expert said the Trump White House is "replaying the Bush administration's greatest hits as farce."
Dec 16, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order designating fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction," a move that came hours before his administration carried out another flurry of deadly strikes on vessels in the eastern Pacific accused—without evidence—of drug trafficking.
Trump's order instructs the Pentagon and other US agencies to "take appropriate action" to "eliminate the threat of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to the United States." The order also warns of "the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries."
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said in response to the executive action that Trump is "replaying the Bush administration's greatest hits as farce," referencing the lead-up to the Iraq War. Trump has repeatedly threatened military attacks on Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, citing fentanyl trafficking as the pretext.
Ahead of the official signing of the fentanyl order, an anonymous State Department official suggested to the independent outlet The Handbasket that the directive's "purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations and creating justification for conducting military operations in Mexico and Canada."
The official also suspected "that it will be used domestically as justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens," reported The Handbasket's Marisa Kabas.
Hours after Trump formally announced the order, the US Southern Command said it carried out strikes on three boats in the eastern Pacific, killing at least eight people.
"The lawless killing spree continues," Finucane wrote late Monday. "The administration justifies this slaughter by claiming there’s an armed conflict. But it won’t even tell the US public who the supposed enemies are. Of course, there’s no armed conflict. And outside armed conflict, we call premeditated killing murder."
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that "Trump's classification of fentanyl as a 'weapon of mass destruction' will do nothing to salvage the blatant illegality of his summary executions off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia because fentanyl largely enters the United States from Mexico."
On Dec. 15, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/IQfCVvUpau
— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) December 16, 2025
Monday's boat bombings brought the death toll from the Trump administration's illegal strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which began in early September, to at least 95.
Writing for Salon last week, Drug Policy Alliance executive director Kassandra Frederique and former counternarcotics official James Saenz observed that "the US is bombing boats that have nothing to do with fentanyl or the overdose crisis devastating American communities."
"These recent military actions have negligible impact on the transshipment of illicit drugs and absolutely no impact on the production or movement of synthetic opioids. And fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for most US overdoses, is not produced in Venezuela," they wrote. "These developments raise serious questions about the direction of US drug policy. We must ask ourselves: If these extrajudicial strikes are not stopping fentanyl, then what are the motives?"
"History should be a warning to us. In the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, the drug war became a tool of fear," Frederique and Saenz added. "Thousands were killed without trial, democratic institutions were hollowed out, and civil liberties stripped away—all while drugs continued to flow into the country."
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