Tag: Fish and Wildlife Service

Trump administration abruptly ends key law enforcement program at wildlife refuges

The Trump administration is abruptly ending a decades-long program that trained national wildlife refuge managers with law enforcement capabilities to police often remote spots of public land.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced to employees on Sept. 21 that refuge managers who were also trained to police the area would no longer be able to act in any enforcement capacity and would be stripped of their firearm, according to an internal FWS email shared with The Hill.

Sources said the decision came as a shock to many of the people who have worked in the position, known as dual-function officers, including retirees who had spent decades in the role at their respective refuges.

Critics argued it would lead to new violations in the refuges.

“It means there will be lots of violations, wildlife violations as in over-bagged hunting areas, damaged fences, signs, roads and all kinds of damage to the environment. If there is no one there to enforce the law, that would spread like wildfire,” said Kim Hanson, who retired from FWS in 2008 after more than 30 years at the agency. “It’s an extreme disservice to the American people because they expect us to take care.”

The nation has 562 national wildlife refuges spread across 20.6 million acres of public land. Unlike national parks, mining, drilling, hunting and farming are all regulated activities on certain refuges.

“Our dual-function officers were an integral aspect of refuge management during a time that allowed for multiple functions within a single position,” stated the memo outlining the change, first obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

“In the 21st Century the threats facing visitors and wildlife are more complex than ever. Protection of the National Wildlife Refuge System now requires a full-time officer corps that combines a concentrated effort on conservation protection, traditional policing and emergency first response to protect, serve and educate the public and Service staff.”

The announcement will strip 51 refuge employees of the enforcement role in two stages between Oct. 1 and Jan. 1, according to the memo.

Hanson for years woke up as early as 4 a.m. to make sure wildfowl hunters on the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge didn’t accidentally kill protected animals or use more bullets than they were allotted.

He was there to both oversee the refuge and police land users to make sure they hunted safely and legally in a role used for decades by the Interior Department.

It was a role he said worked well because he knew the refuge and its regulations better than anyone. The program also didn’t cost the FWS any additional money, as dual-officers were not paid for their law enforcement role but were trained just as much as a full-time officer and had to undergo classes annually.

Under the new plan, he worries that full-time officers won’t be able to cover all the refuges that need policing and that the remaining refuge managers will now have to sit back and witness any violations they see.

“They just have to watch. There is nothing they can do. They can see the violation and their hands are tied,” he said.

There are 230 full-time law enforcement officers policing refuges and FWS officials say they plan to replace the vacant dual-officer positions with 15 full-time officers in 2019 as a way to modernize the enforcement ranks and save costs.

FWS says the change will take away the burden of refuge managers having to perform law enforcement duties.

“Federal Wildlife Officers are expected to perform the same full range of dangerous duties that all uniformed police officers perform. This includes conducting search warrants, eradicating marijuana grows, providing border security, arrest violent offenders and drug dealers; and assist local and state police with persons under the influence drugs and narcotics such as fentanyl and opioids,” a FWS spokesperson told The Hill in a statement. “Dual-function officers carried out their full-time non-law enforcement duties as well as conducted law enforcement on a part-time basis. They will now be enabled to focus fully on their full-time duties within the Refuge System.”

But instead of spreading relief, dual-officer veterans said the decision will likely do more harm than good.

Dozens of refuges in the short-term, they say, will now not have police, and in the long run many of those refuges will only see a law enforcement presence intermittently.

The move comes as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has increased access for more hunters and anglers across various wildlife refuges. In early September, he announced that 251,000 new acres on refuge lands would be open to hunting or fishing. By the 2018-2019 hunting season, 377 refuges will allow hunting and 312 will allow fishing.

Critics say the rollback of law enforcement officers in any capacity seems like odd timing.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Lloyd Jones, who retired from the FWS in 2013 after decades of working at multiple refuges across South Dakota as a dual-officer.

“The dual functions that have been there for decades have been extremely effective in compliance, and now it’s being taken off the table almost over night,” Jones said.

Jones spent a lot of his time at refuges in North Dakota policing neighbors to make sure they were not draining the wetlands on or near the public land.

In that capacity, he sometimes had heated or dangerous encounters with angry landowners.

He doesn’t doubt that without the dual-officers, owners will take advantage of the opportunity to break their easements and drain the wetlands, which could lead to negative environmental impacts for waterfowl and migratory birds that breed there.

“They are trying to do everything in their power to violate the terms of that easement. Once they realize there is going to be void in that law enforcement presence, there is going to be a tremendous impact —  that’s a given. That’s an absolute,” he said.

But Jones’s biggest fear is what could happen to the remaining refuge managers who are now stripped of their law enforcement tools but still feel compelled to protect the lands they work on.

“The biggest fear is that some refuge person, a biologist or manager, is going to respond or react to a situation and either themselves or the public may get hurt,” he said.

“A refuge person isn’t simply going to turn their back on some kind of a situation. They will want to do something about it. And without law enforcement authority or being equipped, they are not only putting the public in danger, they are putting themselves in danger,” Jones said.

[The Hill]

Trump to consider elephant trophy imports on ‘case-by-case’ basis

The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced last week that it will now consider all permits for importing elephant trophies from African nations on a “case-by-case basis,” breaking from President Trump’s earlier promises to maintain an Obama-era ban on the practice.

In a formal memorandum issued on Thursday, FWS said it will withdraw its 2017 Endangered Species Act (ESA) findings for trophies of African elephants from Zimbabwe and Zambia, “effective immediately.”

The memo said “the findings are no longer effective for making individual permit determinations for imports of sport-hunted African elephant trophies.”

In its place, FWS will instead “grant or deny permits to import a sport-hunted trophy on a case-by-case basis.”

FWS said it will still consider the information included in the ESA findings, as well as science-based risk assessments of the species’ vulnerability, when evaluating each permit request.

The service also announced it is withdrawing a number of previous ESA findings, which date back to 1995, related to trophies of African elephants, bontebok and lions from multiple African countries.

The decision to withdraw the FWS findings followed a D.C. Circuit Court decision in December that found fault with the initial Obama-era rule, which banned importing elephant hunting trophies from Zimbabwe.

“In response to a recent D.C. Circuit Court’s opinion, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is revising its procedure for assessing applications to import certain hunted species. We are withdrawing our countrywide enhancement findings for a range of species across several countries,” a spokesperson for FWS said in a statement. “In their place, the Service intends to make findings for trophy imports on an application-by-application basis.”

A federal appeals court ruled at the end of last year that the Obama administration did not follow the right procedures when it drafted its ban on the imports. The court also said the FWS should have gone through the extensive process of proposing a regulation, inviting public comment and making the regulation final when it made determinations in 2014 and 2015 that elephant trophies cannot be brought into the country.

The agency used the same procedures as the Obama administration for its ESA determination in 2017 that led to reopening African elephant imports to the U.S. in November.

At the time, a FWS spokesperson said the reversal “will enhance the survival of the species in the wild.”

Following the fall announcement to overturn the ban, the Trump administration faced immense backlash, which played a role in leading the president to denounce elephant hunting and promise to re-establish the ban.

Trump in February called the administration’s initial decision to overturn the Obama-era ban “terrible.”

In an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, Trump said he had decided to officially turn the order around.

“I didn’t want elephants killed and stuffed and have the tusks brought back into this [country] and people can talk all they want about preservation and all of the things that they’re saying where money goes towards well, money was going in that case, going to a government which was probably taking the money, OK?” Trump said.

Despite the president’s tweets and interviews, however, FWS and the Interior Department remained tight-lipped as to the status of the ban. Numerous requests for information to FWS from The Hill over several months were referred to Interior and left unanswered.

“The president has been very clear in the direction that his administration will go,” the FWS spokesperson said of the new memorandum. “Unfortunately, since aspects of the import permitting program for trophies are the focus of ongoing litigation, the Department is unable to comment about specific next steps at this time.”

Nine days before FWS added the reversal to the Federal Register, the Interior Department announced that it was establishing an International Wildlife Conservation Council to “advise the Secretary of the Interior on the benefits that international recreational hunting has on foreign wildlife and habitat conservation.”

Interior Department Spokeswoman Heather Swift said Tuesday that Zinke and the President’s positions remain unchanged.

“The recent FWS posting on the website does not break any promises. In response to a recent D.C. Circuit Court opinion, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is revising its procedure for assessing applications to import certain hunted species,” she said.

The council will hold its first meeting next week on March 16.

[The Hill]

Trump administration lifts ban on importing heads of hunted elephants

The Trump administration confirmed Thursday it lifted a ban that had prohibited hunters from importing trophies of elephants killed in two African nations, reversing a 2014 rule put in place by the Obama White House.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told NBC News that the agency had “determined that the hunting and management programs for African elephants in Zimbabwe and Zambia will enhance the survival of the species in the wild.”

“Legal, well-regulated sport hunting as part of a sound management program can benefit certain species by providing incentives to local communities to conserve those species and by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation,” the spokesperson said.

The reversal will apply to elephants hunted in Zimbabwe from Jan. 21, 2016 to Dec. 31, 2018 and to elephants hunted in Zambia in 2016, 2017 and 2018 “for applications that meet all other applicable permitting requirements,” the agency spokesperson said.

The move overturns a 2014 rule implemented by former President Barack Obama that banned hunters from bringing the trophy heads of elephants they’d killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia back to the U.S.

The African Bush Elephant is currently listed as endangered, under the Endangered Species Act, but a provision in the law allows for the import of trophies if it can be proved that hunting the animals contributes to conservation efforts.

The statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cited conservation “enhancement findings” in reaching its decision but did not elaborate on what those findings were.

The decision by the agency was first reported Wednesday by ABC News.

Zimbabwe and Zambia issue annual permits allowing foreign hunters to kill animals, like elephants, buffalo and lions, saying the practice allows the nations to raise money for conservation. The Obama White House, however, introduced the initial ban on trophy imports in 2014 after the population of the African elephants fell.

Animal rights groups blasted the Trump administration’s move.

“Let’s be clear: elephants are on the list of threatened species; the global community has rallied to stem the ivory trade; and now, the U.S. government is giving American trophy hunters the green light to kill them,” Wayne Pacelle, the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote in a statement posted on his blog.

“What kind of message does it send to say to the world that poor Africans who are struggling to survive cannot kill elephants in order to use or sell their parts to make a living, but that it’s just fine for rich Americans to slay the beasts for their tusks to keep as trophies?” he added.

Among those who could benefit from the rule change are President Donald Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, who are known big game hunters. Photographs of the pair surfaced in 2012 showing the two men posing with the carcasses of several dead animals from a hunting trip they’d taken a year earlier in Zimbabwe.

[NBC News]

Reality

The Trump administration’s decision to loosen restrictions around the import of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia has turned attention back to the president’s family’s own connection to the controversial sport.

Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump are prolific big-game hunters and during the 2016 campaign, images re-emerged of the pair on a 2011 hunting trip posing with animals they had killed on safari, including an elephant, a buffalo and a leopard.