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endangered species act
Group Sues to Expose Trump 'Extinction Plan' as Study Shows 2,204 Species May Need Protection
"Widespread public support for the Endangered Species Act makes the administration's secrecy around these rules all the more insidious," Shannon continued. "Trump hands out favors to his billionaire friends while ignoring the irreplaceable value of our nation’s endangered wildlife. This lawsuit seeks to bring that corruption out into the open."
Filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit could make the departments of Commerce and the Interior, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), turn over documents about potential revisions to the ESA proposed in response to orders from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
"Thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them."
The complaint warns that if the administration's proposed rules are implemented, they "will dismantle essential protections by, amongst other things, inserting economic considerations into the listing process, curtailing critical habitat designations, prohibiting habitat protections for species threatened by climate change, weakening consultation mandates, and removing nearly all protections for newly designated threatened species."
"On July 3, 2025, the center submitted FOIA requests to each defendant seeking records relating to the development of these proposed rules," the filing details. "The requested records are vital to understanding the basis, rationale, and likely impacts of the agencies' proposed rules. Such information is necessary for meaningful public participation in the rulemaking process."
"Without timely disclosure, the center and its members cannot effectively understand or respond to the agencies' proposed rules, thereby undermining FOIA's core purpose of ensuring government transparency and accountability," the complaint adds, noting that the center sent follow-up requests early last month.
The suit over Trump's "extinction plan" records followed publication of a study in which four experts at the center argued for protecting thousands more species under the landmark 1973 law—which, the analysis notes, "currently protects 1,682 species as endangered or threatened."
"According to the independent scientific organization NatureServe, however, there are more than 10,000 imperiled species in the United States that may need protection," explains the study, published in PeerJ. "One barrier to protecting recognized imperiled species is a lack of threats information."
The center's experts reviewed all species recognized NatureServe as "critically imperiled" or "imperiled" and identified 2,204 species "where there is sufficient threat information to indicate ESA protection may be warranted."
A majority of those species—1,320—are plants, followed by 309 insects, 115 terrestrial snails, 90 freshwater snails, 85 fish, 25 lichen and fungi, 23 reptiles and turtles, 21 amphibians, 14 birds, and various others.
Given that the FWS "has on average listed just 32 species per year since the law was passed," the analysis warns, "at this rate, most species currently recognized as imperiled and facing threats will not receive consideration for protection within any meaningful timeframe."
The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for protecting the Mount Pinos sooty grouse under the Endangered Species Act in June 2024. The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced in January 2026 that it is considering protections. (Photo by James Bland/Center for Biological Diversity)
Noah Greenwald, a study co-author and co-director of endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, stressed in a Tuesday statement that "thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them."
"This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration's slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species," Greenwald declared. "That so many species need help highlights just how much we're degrading the natural world at our own peril."
"Humans need clean air and water and a stable climate, just like the many species in decline," he added. "People are destroying the wild places where plants and animals live, and that habitat destruction remains the greatest threat to species' survival both in the United States and around the world.”
Habitat destruction threatens 92% of the 2,204 species, according to the analysis. Other notable threats include invasive species (33%), small population size (26%), climate change (18%), altered disturbance regime (12%), disease and predation (8%), over-utilization (7%), and inadequacy of existing regulations (4%).
Last week, in response to petitions from the center and other groups, the FWS announced that 10 species across the country—including the Olympic marmot, gray cat's eye plant, Alvord chub fish, Mount Pinos sooty grouse, and San Joaquin tiger beetle—warrant consideration for ESA protections.
"I'm relieved to see these 10 precious plants and animals move closer to the protection they so desperately need," said Greenwald. "Unfortunately they're joining a backlog of hundreds of species waiting for safeguards during an administration that didn't protect a single species last year—the first time that's happened since 1981. As the global extinction crisis deepens, imperiled wildlife need the Endangered Species Act's strong protections now more than ever."
Jaguars Are Returning to Southern Arizona—Will Trump's Wall Stop Them?
When the University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center released the photographs of the jaguar roaming the rugged mountains of southern Arizona, it confirmed that it was a never-before-recorded big cat. Jaguars have their own unique markings, as singular as a human’s fingerprint, and this was one new to the center’s database. Though it has not yet identified its sex, the center is calling it Jaguar No. 5, dubbed Cinco, the fifth jaguar to be photographed in the Sky Islands since 2011, the second one discovered since 2023, and the ninth one spotted in the US since 1996.
Jaguar No. 5. (Photo by UA Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center)
When the photos were made public, and news agencies across the country buzzed with excitement about the future of the state’s wild jaguar population, Schnaufer still felt the existential thrill of knowing he had been hiking in jaguar country.
Three-quarters of a century ago, Aldo Leopold penned his essay “The Green Lagoons,” which chronicles a 1923 canoeing adventure in the Delta region of the Colorado River. He and his brother Carl hoped to “find sign of the… the great mottled jaguar, el tigre.” They “saw neither hide nor hair of him, but his personality pervaded the wilderness.”
While I was researching my book, Heart of the Jaguar, and backpacking sections of the Sky Islands, three jaguars called the Sky Islands home—Cochise, Sombra, and O:ṣhad Ñu:kudam. I never saw so much as a track, but what mattered most to me was what the presence of a big, spotted cat prowling the mountains of southern Arizona implied: a kind of wildness.
A jaguar and cubs are seen in Corixo Negro, Encontro das Aguas State Park. (Photo by April Kelly)
The Sky Islands, situated at the northern edge of a 5,000-mile jaguar range that extends as far south as Argentina, are indeed wild. More than a century ago, they were prime jaguar habitat. Some biologists and conservationists, including Susan Malusa, director of the Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center for the last 13 years, think they still are. “The picture of Jaguar No. 5 is a moment in time,” Malusa says. “But it’s part of a greater story, and that story is that the Sky Islands are part of the jaguar’s historical range. Jaguars wouldn’t be coming here if they weren’t finding what they need.”
The entire jaguar range is based on the principle of connection. Alan Rabinowitz, the celebrated zoologist and co-founder of Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, (who passed away in 2018), envisioned the jaguar realm as a mammal’s circulatory system. The core areas of jaguar production are its heart; the corridors linking them are its veins and arteries. A functioning system would nurture the species, while at the same time allowing nomadic, individual cats the freedom to spread their genetics across the corridor.
Susan Malusa believes it could be just a matter of time before other jaguars cross over from Mexico into the United States. “The cats are coming,” she says. “This is our chance to get it right; we have an obligation. Essentially, our job is not to screw it up.”
But screwing it up is exactly what we are doing. Currently, construction crews are dynamiting huge swaths of the unspoiled Coronado National Memorial and building hulking, 30-foot walls in the San Rafael Valley, creating what will be the longest unbroken stretch of border wall in an area of Arizona that serves as a critical wildlife corridor.
The Trump administration, which is not known for its love of wild places, waived the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and a host of other laws, to build a wall that will stop jaguars and dozens of other species in their tracks. And southern Arizona will be poorer for it. Apex predators like jaguars maintain ecosystem health, balance prey populations, and sustain biodiversity. They also change the spirit of the land. They contribute to what Aldo Leopold described as a “vast pulsing harmony.” And when they are gone, a “glory has departed.”
But perhaps in spite of the obstacles in their path, that glory is beginning to come back, as exemplified by Jaguar No.5.
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