January, 18 2021, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Noah Greenwald, Center for Biological Diversity, (503) 484-7495, ngreenwald@biologicaldiversity.org
Virginia Cramer, Sierra Club, (804) 519-8449, virginia.cramer@sierraclub.org
Gwen Dobbs, Defenders of Wildlife, (202) 772-0269, gdobbs@defenders.org
Lawsuit Challenges Trump Administration's Gutting of Federal Protection for Migratory Birds
WASHINGTON
National environmental groups filed a lawsuit today in the Southern District of New York challenging the Trump administration's reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which eliminated longstanding, vital protections for more than 1,000 species of waterfowl, raptors and songbirds.
Under the Trump administration's revised interpretation, the Act's protections will apply only to activities that are specifically intended to kill birds. So-called "incidental" take, regardless of its impact on bird populations or how foreseeable that impact is--such as letting birds drown in uncovered oil pits--is rendered immune from enforcement under the law.
"Trump's tenure has been a reign of terror for the environment, and his cruel insistence on destroying this century-old law is a testament to his total disregard for wildlife," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The revised rule is nothing but a gift to oil companies and other polluters, allowing them to kill birds without legal consequence. The courts rightfully stopped this farce once before, and we hope this latest suit again fully restores legal protection to birds that desperately need it."
Had the Trump administration's policy been in place at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, British Petroleum would have avoided paying more than $100 million in fines to support wetland and migratory bird conservation to compensate for more than a million birds the accident was estimated to have killed.
"Trump's rollback of migratory bird protections is an appalling and inexcusable give-away to corporate polluters who don't want to face any consequences for killing birds," said Bonnie Rice, Sierra Club's endangered species representative. "Two-thirds of North America's birds are imperiled by climate change. More than three billion birds have vanished since 1970. We need more protections, not less, in the face of this massive loss and the current human-caused extinction crisis."
"We are back in the courts to fight the Trump administration's callous decision to eliminate protections for migratory birds," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. "Even though a federal court already ruled that the administration's reinterpretation of the MBTA was illegal, it pushed forward with its rulemaking to cement this destructive policy into law. We are here to overturn this terrible decision once and for all."
Background
The Trump administration began its assault on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in December 2017 with a legal opinion authored by Daniel Jorjani, the solicitor of the Department of the Interior and a former Koch Industries employee. This opinion has already allowed birds deaths across the country that could have easily been avoided. In May 2018 the Center and allies filed suit in the Southern District of New York to challenge the proposed revision, resulting in a blistering court decision overturning the opinion.
Flouting the court ruling invalidating the basis for the reinterpretation, the Trump administration moved ahead with finalizing the rule on Jan. 4, along with a flurry of other last-minute actions aimed at eviscerating an array of essential environmental laws and regulations.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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Protest in Oslo Denounces Nobel Peace Prize for Right-Wing Machado
"No peace prize for warmongers," said one of the banners displayed by demonstrators, who derided Machado's support for President Donald Trump's regime change push in Venezuela.
Dec 10, 2025
As President Donald Trump issued new threats of a possible ground invasion in Venezuela, protesters gathered outside the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo on Tuesday to protest the awarding of the prestigious peace prize to right-wing opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whom they described as an ally to US regime change efforts.
“This year’s Nobel Prize winner has not distanced herself from the interventions and the attacks we are seeing in the Caribbean, and we are stating that this clearly breaks with Alfred Nobel’s will," said Lina Alvarez Reyes, the information adviser for the Norwegian Solidarity Committee for Latin America, one of the groups that organized the protests.
Machado's daughter delivered a speech accepting the award on her behalf on Wednesday. The 58-year-old engineer was unable to attend the ceremony in person due to a decade-long travel ban imposed by Venezuelan authorities under the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
Via her daughter, Machado said that receiving the award "reminds the world that democracy is essential to peace... And more than anything, what we Venezuelans can offer the world is the lesson forged through this long and difficult journey: that to have a democracy, we must be willing to fight for freedom."
But the protesters who gathered outside the previous day argue that Machado—who dedicated her acceptance of the award in part to Trump and has reportedly worked behind the scenes to pressure Washington to ramp up military and financial pressure on Venezuela—is not a beacon of democracy, but a tool of imperialist control.
As Venezuelan-American activist Michelle Ellner wrote in Common Dreams in October after Machado received the award:
She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narco-trafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
She pushed for the US sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
The protesters outside the Nobel Institute on Tuesday felt similarly: "No peace prize for warmongers," read one banner. "US hands off Latin America," read another.
The protest came on the same day Trump told reporters that an attack on the mainland of Venezuela was coming soon: “We’re gonna hit ‘em on land very soon, too,” the president said after months of extrajudicial bombings of vessels in the Caribbean that the administration has alleged with scant evidence are carrying drugs.
On the same day that Machado received the award in absentia, US warplanes were seen circling over the Gulf of Venezuela. Later, in what Bloomberg described as a "serious escalation," the US seized an oil tanker off the nation's coast.
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Princeton Experts Speak Out Against Trump Boat Strikes as 'Illegal' and Destabilizing 'Murders'
"Deploying an aircraft carrier and US Southern Command assets to destroy small yolas and wooden boats is not only unlawful, it is an absurd escalation," said one scholar.
Dec 10, 2025
Multiple scholars at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs on Wednesday spoke out against the Trump administration's campaign of bombing suspected drug boats, with one going so far as to call them acts of murder.
Eduardo Bhatia, a visiting professor and lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton, argued that it was "unequivocal" that the attacks on on purported drug boats are illegal.
"They violate established maritime law requiring interdiction and arrest before the use of lethal force, and they represent a grossly disproportionate response by the US," stressed Bhatia, the former president of the Senate of Puerto Rico. "Deploying an aircraft carrier and US Southern Command assets to destroy small yolas and wooden boats is not only unlawful, it is an absurd escalation that undermines regional security and diplomatic stability."
Deborah Pearlstein, director of the Program in Law and Public Policy at Princeton, said that she has been talking with "military operations lawyers, international law experts, national security legal scholars," and other experts, and so far has found none who believe the administration's boat attacks are legal.
Pearlstein added that the illegal strikes are "a symptom of the much deeper problem created by the purging of career lawyers on the front end, and the tacit promise of presidential pardons on the back end," the result of which is that "the rule of law loses its deterrent effect."
Visiting professor Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that it was not right to describe the administration's actions as war crimes given that a war, by definition, "requires a level of sustained hostilities between two organized forces that is not present with the drug cartels."
Rather, Roth believes that the administration's policy should be classified as straight-up murder.
"These killings are still murders," he emphasized. "Drug trafficking is a serious crime, but the appropriate response is to interdict the boats and arrest the occupants for prosecution. The rules governing law enforcement prohibit lethal force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, which the boats do not present."
International affairs professor Jacob N. Shapiro pointed to the past failures in the US "War on Drugs," and predicted more of the same from Trump's boat-bombing spree.
"In 1986, President Ronald Reagan announced the 'War on Drugs,' which included using the Coast Guard and military to essentially shut down shipment through the Caribbean," Shapiro noted. "The goal was to reduce supply, raise prices, and thereby lower use. Cocaine prices in the US dropped precipitously from 1986 through 1989, and then dropped slowly through 2006. Traffickers moved from air and sea to land routes. That policy did not work, it's unclear why this time will be different."
The scholars' denunciation of the boat strikes came on the same day that the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in yet another escalatory act of aggression intended to put further economic pressure on the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
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Pentagon Weighed Sending Boat Strike Survivors to Salvadoran Prison to Avoid Defending Bombings in Court
One former Navy lawyer said the Trump administration "might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Dec 10, 2025
Pentagon officials asked about sending survivors of US boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador in a bid to keep them out of American courts—where the Trump administration's high seas extrajudicial killing spree would be subject to legal scrutiny.
New details published Tuesday by the New York Times revealed that attorneys at the US Department of Defense inquired about whether two survivors of an October 16 strike on a boat allegedly smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean could be sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where the Trump administration has shipped ihundreds of mostly Venezuelan victims of its mass deportation campaign.
The prison—the centerpiece of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s war on crime—has been plagued by allegations of torture and other abuse.
One Trump administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Times that State Department lawyers were "stunned" by the query. The two boat strike survivors were ultimately returned to Colombia and Ecuador, their home countries.
Other unnamed officials told the newspaper that repatriations—either to survivors' home countries or to third nations—would become the administration's default plan for dealing with anyone who lived through the US attacks.
The goal, the officials said, was to avoid trying boat strike survivors in US courts, where the discovery process would compel the Trump administration—which has offered no concrete evidence to support its claims that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs—to provide legal justification for attacks that experts say are illegal.
The Pentagon's inquiry followed a September 2 "double-tap" strike on a vessel carrying 11 passengers. Two men survived the initial bombing but were killed in a second strike. Since then, at least 76 other people have been killed in 23 boat strikes reported by the Trump administration.
In addition to the two men who initially survived the September 2 strike and the two repatriated survivors of the October 16 attack, one other person who lived through a boat bombing was left adrift at sea and is presumed dead.
Some observers have noted similarities between the Trump administration's goal of keeping boat strike survivors out of US courtrooms and War on Terror policies and practices—first implemented during the George W. Bush administration—such as extraordinary rendition, the use of Central Intelligence Agency "black sites," and imprisonment of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba—designed to circumvent the law.
While the Trump administration previously sent migrants captured during its crackdown to Guantánamo, sending boat strike survivors to the lockup allow their lawyers to sue for habeas corpus, a right granted by the US Supreme Court in its 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision.
The Trump administration has revived the term "unlawful enemy combatant"—which was used by the Bush administration to classify people caught up in the War on Terror in a way that skirts the law—to apply to boat strike survivors. The Pentagon has also called such survivors "distressed mariners," a term that normally applies to civilians stranded at sea.
“If we’re in a war, they should be using the term ‘shipwrecked survivors,’” Mark Nevitt, a former Navy lawyer who is now a law professor at Emory University, told the Times. “My theory is they might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Relatives of men killed in the strikes, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, say that at least some of the victims were fishermen who were not linked to the illicit drug trade. One expert said last month that even in cases of vessels that were involved in drug trafficking, the bombings were "the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”
Even if the men targeted in the boat strikes were running drugs, "the appropriate response is to interdict the boats and arrest the occupants for prosecution," former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Wednesday.
"The rules governing law enforcement prohibit lethal force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury," he added, "which the boats do not present."
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