11 August 23
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
The jurist disclosed his new rate card in a mass e-mail sent to more than a hundred super-donors.
“I have tried to keep my prices reasonable, but, as inflation proves more stubborn than predicted, I have no choice but to adjust my rates accordingly,” he wrote.
“Sadly, the days of shredding civil rights in exchange for ten private-jet flights are over,” he added.
It remains to be seen whether the billionaires who received Thomas’s e-mail will tolerate his steeper prices or whether they will explore a budget option such as Neil Gorsuch.
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Woman holds sign in support of ballot question 1, which would have made it more difficult for an abortion rights amendment in November. (photo: Darron Cummings/AP)
The party has one principle left: Power is only legitimate when it’s wielded by Republicans.
The abortion question is an important one, and now Ohioans will get to have a straight majority-rule vote in November on whether to protect abortion rights in the state constitution.
Judging from the outcome on “Issue 1” this week, pro-life Republicans are in grave danger of losing that vote. They already knew that, which is why they tried to rig it with a 60% threshold, instead of 50%. Even Kari Lake showed up to campaign for the power grab.
Soon after last summer’s Dobbs decision, it became clear that Republicans’ long-fought victory on abortion was an unpopular political loser. Voters in Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere have all voted in favor of abortion rights. The same could not be allowed to happen in Ohio.
A political party with a stake in democratic values would internally debate a compromise; or embrace Dobbs and let the chips fall where they may; or come up with a messaging strategy to win voters over. But the Trumpist GOP is not that party.
The same impulse that led Ohio Republicans to brazenly rig November’s abortion vote also led North Carolina Republicans, tired of sharing power in their evenly divided state, to sue all the way to the Supreme Court to block Democrats from having a say in congressional maps. It gave Donald Trump fertile ground to launch his political career pretending Barack Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president. It incubated the lie that the 2020 election must have been stolen, not lost.
And it animates the decrepit idea, confirmed in polling this week, that Trump is being prosecuted not for crimes against democracy, national security, and the rule of law, but because he’s a persecuted victim just “like me.”
Retired conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, who advised Mike Pence on the eve of Jan. 6 that he had no power to play functionary in Trump’s coup, declared this week that the GOP is no longer a political party able to function in a democracy. Trump took and maintains control of the GOP for precisely this reason. He embodies the one principle left in the GOP: Power is only legitimate when it’s wielded by Republicans.
Democrats, independents, and more than a few erstwhile Republicans in Ohio—and a lot of other places—seem pretty opposed to that idea.
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A construction worker takes a sip of water while repairing a road in Houston, Texas, on June 27, 2023. (photo: Mark Felix/Getty)
In addition to blocking action on climate change, lobbyists for oil and gas companies are pushing back against federal labor protections meant to safeguard workers from the effects of record-high temperatures.
As a result, most of the nation’s workers still aren’t guaranteed access to water, rest, and shade — the basic precautions needed to fend off dangerous heat stress. Heat exposure could already be responsible for as many as two thousand workplace deaths each year, and research suggests that it is three times as deadly when combined with exposure to air pollution from sources like wildfire smoke.
Business lobbies representing the agriculture, construction, and railroad industries have also opposed state rules protecting outdoor workers from smoke exposure.
The key opponent to worker climate protections include the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a well-funded influence machine that describes itself as “the voice of small business” while pushing corporate agendas like the rollback of child labor protections. The group reported spending more than $1 million lobbying the federal government last year on issues including legislation to fast-track heat protections for workers. Soon after, the bill stalled.
Lobbyists for oil and gas companies — whose products are fueling the record-breaking heat that in turn drives demand for more fossil fuels — are now pushing back against rules on workplace heat safety being developed by federal labor regulators.
“Most employers don’t come out and say, ‘I oppose water breaks,’” said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate for climate and health at the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, who is tracking state legislative efforts on heat protection. “So they hide behind these industry lobbying groups instead.”
In an address on extreme heat last month, President Joe Biden said his Labor Department would step up workplace inspections and issue a new alert about heat hazards. But labor and climate advocates are calling for faster action — including passage of legislation named for a California farmworker who died during a ten-hour shift picking grapes in 105 degree heat — to expedite the new heat safety rules.
“It’s not heat that kills workers so much as employers’ failure to provide protections,” said Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary for the Labor Department’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) during the Barack Obama administration. “While OSHA can certainly provide information for those employers who are willing to listen, a mandatory standard is almost always going to be more effective than voluntary guidance.”
While virtually all of OSHA’s workplace safety rules face opposition from the business lobby, a proposed heat standard “is going to affect more people and more employers than most,” Barab noted. “And unfortunately, for the ideological right wing of this country, it’s intimately tied in with denial of climate change — so that adds a whole other level of opposition.”
Without congressional action, heat safety rules are expected to take years to finalize. To date, the Biden administration has not announced plans to enact rules governing wildfire smoke exposure for outdoor workers, a step recommended by the National Academy of Sciences last year.
Workers Wait Decades for Protection
More than fifty years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended mandatory standards to protect workers from heat exposure, which can lead to organ failure and blood poisoning even in young, healthy people. All branches of the US armed forces have now adopted such standards. But for years, federal labor regulators delayed action while climate change intensified.
In 2011, following a summer that then was one of the hottest on record, labor and climate groups petitioned OSHA — whose rules cover most of the nation’s private sector workers — for a new rule mandating common sense requirements for all high-heat job sites. In addition to water and cooling-off breaks, occupational safety experts recommend an acclimatization period for new employees, who often die during their first few days on the job.
But President Barack Obama’s OSHA denied the petition. Already more than a decade into developing rules curbing workers’ exposure to silica dust and beryllium, the understaffed and underfunded agency “just had no resources to also work on a heat standard at that point,” Barab, the former deputy assistant secretary, told the Lever.
Another petition in 2018, this time joined by former OSHA directors, went ignored by the Donald Trump administration before Biden’s agency finally began the rulemaking process in 2021. But that process typically takes at least seven years and can drag out for up to 20, thanks to exacting requirements and fierce industry opposition.
Federal statutes and court decisions require OSHA to undertake a grueling rulemaking process, and an anti-regulatory law passed in the 1990s gives small businesses and their lobbies early sway in the process. When employers and industry groups decide to sue over completed rules — they almost always do — a rigorous standard for judicial review eases the path for legal challenges, keeping the agency tied up in court.
In February, seven state attorneys general petitioned OSHA to issue an emergency heat standard that would have taken effect this summer.
As the attorneys general noted in their petition, “occupational heat exposure is an issue of environmental and racial justice, as people of color and low-wage workers are disproportionately burdened by heat stress in the workplace.”
But the agency again denied the petition, citing the vulnerability of past emergency standards to legal challenges — including a lawsuit brought by the NFIB, the supposed small business lobby, that ultimately halted the Biden administration’s employer COVID-19 vaccine mandate last year. The corporate lobbying group’s successful legal argument before the Supreme Court last year provided a blueprint for recent cases stripping federal agencies of their power to fight climate change.
NFIB is also pushing OSHA to abandon workplace heat rules, arguing that sufficient private sector protections already exist.
“Employers and employees alike have a moral and financial interest in protecting employees from ill effects of heat at work, and they use common sense, water, rest, and shade, and when necessary more formal heat protection programs, often including engineering or administrative controls, for protection against heat,” the group’s general counsel, David Addington, wrote in 2021 regulatory comments.
Addington, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, added: “In the unfortunate situations in which heat injuries nevertheless occur, unemployment compensation, health insurance, and life insurance systems can mitigate the adverse impact on workers and their families.”
The American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group that receives millions from oil and gas companies to oppose climate action, similarly argued that the new rules are unnecessary.
“The oil and gas industry understands heat stress risks and has successfully managed it for decades,” wrote a policy advisor for the group. “We would welcome more information and understanding on what is driving OSHA’s interest in this issue.”
Federal workplace safety data shows that workers have fallen sick or died from heat exposure while welding pipelines, constructing fracking wastewater tanks, and servicing oil wells.
Lobbying groups representing the agriculture and construction industries also submitted comments objecting to OSHA’s proposal, as reported by the Guardian.
Neither NFIB nor the American Petroleum Institute responded to the Lever’s request for comment.
“Lives Are at Risk”
Many of the same industry lobbying groups have also fought state-level efforts to enact climate protections for workers. Just five states have enacted workplace heat rules, and only three require employers to safeguard outdoor workers from wildfire smoke.
In Texas, which has more recorded heat-related deaths than any other state, Republican governor Greg Abbott in June signed what’s known locally as a “Death Star” bill preempting local ordinances that guaranteed water breaks for workers — the kind of preemption that has been a longtime priority for NFIB.
At least four workers in the state have died this summer after collapsing in triple-digit heat, including a twenty-four-year-old construction worker in San Antonio whose body temperature was nearly 110 degrees at his time of death.
While construction and farmworkers die from heat exposure at the highest rates, workers toiling in poorly ventilated warehouses, delivery trucks, and commercial kitchens are also at risk. At present, only Oregon’s heat standard applies to indoor workers.
California will soon extend protections to indoor workers and strengthen wildfire smoke rules, despite lobbying by NFIB and other industry groups.
But in Nevada, fierce opposition by lobbyists representing the state’s powerhouse hospitality sector this summer killed both legislation and proposed regulations that would have covered its workers.
Hospitality and other business lobbies are now lining up against proposed wildfire smoke rules in Washington state that would make permanent emergency rules put in place two years ago, as fires burned more than one million acres in the Pacific Northwest. The proposed rules would ramp up protective measures such as respirator use and schedule changes as air pollution levels rise.
While employers typically complain that heat and smoke exposure rules will be too costly, a growing body of research suggests that both conditions take a toll on labor force participation and productivity. Workplace heat stress costs the economy some $100 billion a year, according to one estimate by the watchdog group Public Citizen.
“There is no cost-benefit analysis that makes sense when lives are at risk,” said Juley Fulcher, the group’s worker health and safety advocate. “But if employers are going to complain that this is going to cost too much money — the reality is that not protecting workers is already costing us all.”
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A detainee transport van exits the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a former prison repurposed as an immigration detention facility operated by the GEO Group. (photo: Quinn Glabicki/Reuters)
The opportunity for action came early in the Democratic president's term, in May 2021, when a group of senior immigration officials launched an internal review of detention centers to decide which should be scaled back, reformed or closed.
The review, which has not been previously reported, followed years of complaints from government watchdogs, detainees and advocates about poor medical care and sanitation, a lack of access to lawyers, sexual assault and detainee deaths.
Months later, the group shared findings with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, highlighting around two dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers and recommending some be closed, according to five current and former officials, who requested anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.
Reuters could not confirm which centers were recommended to be shut down.
But, as illegal crossings reached record highs at the U.S.-Mexico border - putting pressure on Biden officials to keep detention space available - they only announced the closure of one facility in March 2022.
The stalled reform coincided with a boom in private prison revenues from ICE contracts during the Biden administration and an increase in the percentage of detainees being held in private facilities, according to an analysis of ICE data by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shared exclusively with Reuters.
Some officials argue private facilities can be better than local jails that contract with ICE. Companies say they provide crucial flexibility and adhere to ICE standards.
As Biden gears up to seek re-election in 2024 - and a possible rematch against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump - immigration remains a political flashpoint. Advocates and some Democrats have criticized Biden for not going far enough to reverse hardline Trump policies and adopting some restrictive measures. At the same time, Republicans have lambasted Biden as too lenient.
While the review sought to close or reform troubled centers, the White House and Mayorkas wanted to preserve detention beds and were concerned with backlash in counties that benefited economically from the detention centers, three of the officials said.
The Biden administration shuttered or reduced use of some of the most criticized lockups, but it seemed like "the barest minimum" compared to what was initially envisioned by the group that conducted the review, one of the officials said.
A White House spokesperson said Biden "continues to support moving away from the use of private detention facilities in the immigration detention system."
ICE regularly reviews detention operations "to ensure non-citizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled," a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said.
One facility evaluated as part of the Biden administration review was Stewart Detention Center, a Georgia lockup operated by the private prison company CoreCivic (CXW.N).
Eight Stewart detainees have died since 2017, the most of any center. A complaint filed in 2022 on behalf of four women alleged that they were sexually assaulted by a male nurse in the facility.
Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, said the safety and well-being of detainees was the company's "top priority" and that the employee in question was on administrative leave as ICE and Georgia authorities investigate.
The Biden administration also looked at, but declined to close, several centers that were part of a Trump-era expansion in Louisiana and Mississippi, two of the officials said.
The facilities included Winn Correctional Center, a Louisiana detention run by LaSalle Corrections. A government watchdog recommended in 2021 that Winn "be closed or drawn down until several critical health and safety concerns could be addressed."
While the Biden administration said in 2022 it would limit the use of Winn, the center currently houses 1,100 detainees.
Richwood Correctional Center, also run by LaSalle in Louisiana, was called out in a government report this year for a lack of critical translation services.
Ruben Dario, an Argentine who was detained at Richwood for eight months in 2022, said he needed to serve as an ad-hoc translator for a Mexican man on the verge of a stroke because staff didn't speak Spanish.
"If you don't know what they are asking you, you won't know how to answer, either," he said.
Ryan Horvath, a spokesperson for LaSalle, said the company offered the federal government increased capacity and specialized services. Richwood had at least 14 Spanish-speaking employees last year and translation tools, he added.
BIDEN LEANS INTO PRIVATE DETENTION
ICE detainees include people who recently crossed the border, as well as those living in the country illegally, including asylum seekers. Many are fighting court cases to avoid deportation.
While the numbers of detainees dropped during the pandemic, in part due to lawsuits by rights groups, populations are rising again.
More than 90% of the roughly 31,000 people being held by ICE on average in July were in private facilities, up from 80% at the end of the Trump administration, according to the ACLU analysis.
Under Biden, private prison company GEO Group (GEO.N) saw its revenues from ICE contracts for detention centers and remote monitoring of immigrants jump to a record $1.05 billion in 2022, up nearly 40% from the previous year, corporate filings show.
CoreCivic, GEO's biggest competitor, also sustained high revenues from ICE during Biden's term, according to corporate filings.
Under a new Biden asylum policy that went into effect on May 11, more migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border are being sent to detention centers for rapid asylum screenings. Nine centers are focused on the screenings, two officials said. All are privately run.
By mid-July, two months into the new policy, the number of people in ICE custody had jumped by 48% compared to the beginning of the year, according to ICE data.
The administration has scaled back immigration detention in some ways. During Biden's first months in office, before the detention review formally began, ICE shuttered two much-criticized facilities. The agency also stopped family detention by early 2022 and significantly increased the number of people released with electronic monitoring while they await their immigration court hearings.
A White House spokesperson highlighted the use of detention alternatives and said they "could be making a lot more progress" if Congress would provide more funding and enact reforms.
GEO Group subsidiary BI Incorporated manages one of the monitoring programs and GEO's chief operating officer told investors in February that the number of people under remote supervision peaked at more than 300,000 at one point last year. The monitoring program predominately drove GEO's revenue growth from ICE, a company spokesperson said.
In April, GEO's chief executive Jose Gordo told investors of "potential opportunities for upside" for the company, including "increases in populations at our ICE facilities."
ICE often pays to maintain a fixed number of beds at detention centers regardless of whether they are actually used.
Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a GEO Group-run lockup in California, currently houses only 16 detainees due to a COVID-related court order despite paying to maintain a minimum of 640 beds in 2023.
A PRISON REPURPOSED
In March 2021, following a Biden executive order to phase out the use of private prisons for federal detainees, a remote prison in central Pennsylvania run by GEO Group shut down. But just six months later, the company signed a contract to reopen the same complex as a 1,900-bed immigration detention center.
Angela Kelley, a senior adviser to Mayorkas at the time, said officials were aware that opening a new privately run detention center could appear hypocritical.
"It wasn't as if people forgot about the fact that the president made this commitment," said Kelley, who now works with an immigration lawyers association. "Once you're in the chair making these decisions, executing on the promises is a lot different."
Now called the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, razor wire has been removed from the fences and staff do not carry deadly weapons. Detainees are called "residents" and guards are "resident advisers."
Other things, however, have stayed the same. Some 80% of prison staff transitioned to the detention center, a GEO Group supervisor said during a tour with Reuters. Visitors pass through secure checkpoints and detainees are not permitted to move freely. There are cells for solitary confinement.
Sunny Boy Sonkarlay, a Liberian immigrant, was detained at Moshannon for 14 months until he was released in July, according to his attorney and court documents.
The 28-year-old alleged guards slammed doors in his face and unfairly placed him in solitary confinement on several occasions, leading him to attempt suicide, an incident documented in his medical records and a civil rights complaint.
"I tried to hang myself because I just couldn't take it," he said.
GEO did not comment directly on Sonkarlay's complaints but said it strives to treat everyone in their facilities "with dignity and respect." It added it invested approximately $4 million to make improvements at Moshannon.
At a November 2021 county meeting to discuss the Moshannon transition to a detention center, one GEO employee talked about crying in her car when she heard the prison would close, saying "it was devastating" thinking about people losing their livelihoods.
Then Erika Guadalupe Nunez, executive director of a Philadelphia-based immigrant organization, stood up to speak.
"I have heard the opening of Moshannon Valley being described as something that will provide jobs for the community, and that is how it is being sold to you," she said. "Your livelihood should not depend on the imprisonment of others. This community deserves better."
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Fernando Villavicencio's campaign slogan was: "It's time for the brave" (photo: EPA)
"Here, we pay for democracy with our lives."
But on Wednesday, they proved all too prophetic. Villavicencio, a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, was gunned down as he left the rally in the capital, Quito.
His assassination is not an isolated incident.
A mayor shot as he was inspecting public works, bodies strung from bridges, gang leaders publishing videos in which they threaten to kill politicians unless they do their bidding - a seemingly endless litany of violence has dominated the headlines in this country previously known for its safety.
In 2018, the murder rate stood at 5.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. A majority of its population told a Gallup poll they felt safe walking alone at night.
By 2022, Ecuador's homicide rate had more than quadrupled and Ecuadoreans' perception of safety had plummeted, along with their confidence in police to keep them secure.
It is safe to assume that, were a poll to be conducted now, the percentage of those who feel safe would be even lower.
How did Ecuador, a country which until so recently was considered a safe oasis for tourists and locals alike, become a nation where democratically elected politicians are gunned down?
The answer is gangs - and geography.
Ecuador is sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the two largest producers of cocaine in the world.
Cocaine production recently reached a record high, according to the United Nations Global Report on Cocaine 2023.
Colombia and Peru, where the coca leaf - the raw material used to make cocaine - is grown, are at the centre of this illegal trade spanning large parts of the globe.
And while production is up, so are the seizures of the drug made by police worldwide.
Colombia, in particular, has spent decades trying to stem the flow of cocaine and its police have received training and support from the US.
But just as police forces have pooled resources in order to disrupt the flow of cocaine, the gangs doing the trafficking have also become more international.
Following the demobilisation of Colombia's Farc rebel group - once a major player in the cocaine trade - new players have emerged which have forged alliances far beyond Colombia's borders.
Mexican drug cartels and criminal groups from the Balkans have gained a foothold in South America.
These groups were keen to explore new ways to transport the cocaine produced in Colombia to its buyers in Europe and the United States.
As formerly lawless areas in Colombia came under control of the state forces following the peace deal signed between the Colombian government and the Farc rebels in 2016, the need for new routes became more pressing.
These transnational crime groups increasingly eyed Ecuador as an attractive transit country for their drug shipments.
Its porous border with Colombia, its good infrastructure and its large ports on the Pacific coast - such as Guayaquil - made Ecuador geographically convenient for these gangs.
Ecuador's security forces also had little experience of dealing with powerful cartels, meaning they were not prepared for the influx of heavily armed criminals.
It did not take long for transnational crime syndicates to infiltrate local gangs, which up until then had dedicated themselves to lesser crimes such as extortion.
Many of these new alliances were forged inside Ecuador's jails and it was behind bars that the surge of violence and brutality which has since spread to Ecuador's cities first erupted.
Gangs with ties to rival cartels in Mexico confronted each other in jails, mutilating each other with home-made weapons and displaying the decapitated heads of their enemies.
Hundreds of inmates have been killed in deadly fights in Ecuador's overcrowded prisons over the past years. Some of the deadliest incidents happened in El Litoral prison in Guayaquil.
Efforts to quell the violence by transferring prisoners to different jails seem merely to have spread the problem nationwide.
Last month, 136 guards were held hostage by inmates who staged simultaneous riots in jails across the country.
And while many of the leaders of the gangs which have emerged in Ecuador are behind bars, the violence they have unleashed has not been confined to the prisons.
Through mobile phones smuggled into the jails, they run their criminal enterprises on the outside and order the killings of those perceived as standing in their way.
Fernando Villavicencio had been threatened the week before he died by members of Los Choneros, a gang named after the city of Chone, in western Ecuador.
Los Choneros has ties to the Sinaloa cartel, whose former leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is in jail in the US.
Buoyed by the money channelled to them from their new allies abroad and their firepower boosted by high-powered weapons smuggled in from the US via Mexico, these gangs have become a formidable enemy.
Few are willing to confront them. Fernando Villavicencio was one of them.
Even after having been warned by Los Choneros not to defy the gang or even mention its name, Villavicencio remained true to his campaign slogan: "It's time for the brave".
"They [the gangs] said they would break me, but I don't fear them," he said in a video uploaded to the internet shortly after he was threatened.
Villavicencio was given police protection, but he continued to campaign. Just moments before his death, he was shaking the hands of voters.
Shortly after his brutal killing, a video appeared showing masked men admitting carrying out his assassination and threatening another presidential candidate.
The masked men say they belong not to Los Choneros, but to a gang calling itself Los Lobos (The Wolves), which has links to another powerful Mexican criminal organisation, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Another video appeared hours later, in which men who claiming to be Los Lobos denied having played any role in the killing. "We don't cover our faces (...) the video in which masked men with assault rifles pretend to be members of our organisation is totally false."
The group of men in the second video said the first video was uploaded in order to "destabilise the country and blame Los Lobos for this tragedy which is happening in our country".
While police have not yet said who they think is behind Fernando Villavicencio's assassination, the fact that a presidential candidate could be killed while under police protection at a public event in the capital will leave Ecuadoreans who do not enjoy such levels of protection fearing for their safety.
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A female red wolf emerges from her den sheltering newborn pups at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., on May 13, 2019. (photo: Gerry Broome/AP)
The conservation groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2020 after it stopped releasing captive-bred wolves. Eastern North Carolina is the only place in the world where they roam wild outside of zoos and wildlife refuges.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute. A settlement agreement was reached Wednesday, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in North Carolina.
“For 25 years, North Carolina was home to one of the most successful predator reintroductions in the world,” Ramona McGee, a Southern Environmental Law Center attorney, said in a statement. “This settlement puts us on a path to restoring the red wolf to its rightful place as a celebrated success story.”
Red wolves once occupied much of the Eastern U.S. but were driven to near extinction by trapping, hunting and habitat loss before they were reintroduced to North Carolina in 1987. Their range is limited to five North Carolina counties. Scientists at zoos and other sites have maintained a captive population of nearly 300 wolves in recent years.
After red wolves were reintroduced, the state’s wild population grew beyond 100 and remained stable through 2012.
Wolf numbers were bolstered by releases of captive-born pups and sterilization of coyotes that competed for space. But those approaches were halted in 2015 amid pressure from conservative politicians and landowners who deemed wolves a nuisance.
Red wolves are in an area dominated by farms and private land. At least 96 red wolves died of gunshot wounds over the decades.
Some landowners have said that the wolves have made it harder to fight coyotes. A federal judge in 2014 banned night hunting of coyotes in red wolf territory because the canines are easily mixed up.
By the time conservation groups filed their 2020 lawsuit, they said there could be as few as seven red wolves living in the wild. The groups argued that federal wildlife officials violated the Endangered Species Act through actions that included halting the release of captive-bred wolves in 2015.
The lawsuit prompted a federal judge in 2021 to order the Fish and Wildlife Service to produce a plan to bolster the wild wolves’ numbers as the lawsuit continued.
U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle noted in his order that the conservation groups were likely to succeed, while demonstrating that “extinction is a very real possibility.”
According to the settlement agreement, the Fish and Wildlife Service will develop and publish red wolf release plans for a period of eight years. The plans will include “metrics that can be used to measure performance.”
The agency wrote that it “acknowledges the importance of the Eastern North Carolina red wolf population” and committed to managing in a way that’s consistent with the Endangered Species Act.
As of June, the Fish and Wildlife Service said there 16 known or collared red wolves living in the wild, while estimating the total wild population to be 32 to 34. There were 278 red wolves in the captive population.
Johanna Hamburger, a senior attorney with the Animal Welfare Institute, said in a statement Wednesday that the agreement “pulls wild red wolves back from the brink of extinction.”
“When we filed this lawsuit, scientists warned that if the (Fish and Wildlife Service) continued down that path, red wolves could be extinct in the wild by 2024,” she said.
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