Trump Wants a New Border Wall. It Would Block a Key Wildlife Corridor.
'A barrier here would block species movement, destroy protected habitats, and inflict irreversible damage on critical ecological linkages,' the report said.
Wildlife cameras have photographed 20 species of wildlife moving freely across the border in this area — including black bears, mountain lions and mule deer — movement that would be sharply curtailed by the planned 30-foot-tall wall, researchers say.
This part of the borderlands, which includes the San Rafael Valley and the Patagonia and Huachuca Mountains, also contains critical habitat for endangered jaguars, at least three of which have been recorded in the area over the past decade. At least 16 other threatened and endangered species are found there.
'It's a good perspective of what's going and what's going to happen,' Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist and a senior researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said of the report. If this wall and a few others are built, he said, 'there will be no jaguars in the U.S. soon.'
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, cleared the way for construction on this stretch of wall in June by issuing waivers that exempt contractors from more than 30 federal laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act.
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Associated Press
5 minutes ago
- Associated Press
NATO to coordinate regular and large-scale arm deliveries to Ukraine. Most will be bought from US
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO started coordinating regular deliveries of large weapons packages to Ukraine after the Netherlands said it would provide air defense equipment, ammunition and other military aid worth 500 million euros ($578 million), most bought from the U.S. Two deliveries are expected this month. The equipment that will be provided is based on Ukraine's priority needs on the battlefield. NATO allies then locate the weapons and ammunition and send them on. 'Packages will be prepared rapidly and issued on a regular basis,' NATO said late Monday Air defense systems are in greatest need. The United Nations has said that Russia's relentless pounding of urban areas behind the front line has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians. Russia's bigger army is also making slow but costly progress along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line. Currently, it is waging an operation to take the eastern city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub whose fall could allow it to drive deeper into Ukraine. European allies and Canada are buying most of the equipment they plan to send from the United States, which has greater stocks of ready military materiel, as well as more effective weapons. The Trump administration is not giving any arms to Ukraine. The new deliveries will come on top of other pledges of military equipment. The Kiel Institute, which tracks support to Ukraine, estimates that as of June, European countries had provided 72 billion euros ($83 billion) worth of military aid since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, compared to $65 billion in U.S. aid. Dutch Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said that 'American air defense systems and munitions, in particular, are crucial for Ukraine to defend itself.' Announcing the deliveries Monday, he said Russia's attacks are 'pure terror, intended to break Ukraine.' Germany said Friday that it will deliver two more Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine in the coming days. It agreed to the move after securing assurances that the U.S. will prioritize the delivery of new Patriots to Germany to backfill its stocks. These weapon systems are only made in the U.S.
New York Times
35 minutes ago
- New York Times
Is There a Smart Way to Cede Power to Donald Trump?
In this episode of 'The Opinions,' David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Opinion, debates his colleagues Binyamin Appelbaum and Emily Bazelon about the agreements Ivy League universities have reached with the Trump administration and what those deals mean for the future of higher education and other organizations fighting with the White House. Below is a transcript of an episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. David Leonhardt: Emily, Binya and I have been in an ongoing conversation and a bit of a friendly debate about the deals that colleges are making with the Trump administration. And as we're taping this, on July 31, Columbia, Brown and Penn have all agreed to deals, and Harvard and some other colleges may soon. I find this issue to be more complicated than some of the other big questions about how Americans should respond to the Trump administration. It's not clear to me that the colleges have done something wrong by agreeing to these settlements, and so we're going to dig into these tough questions. Emily, I want to start with you. You've been following this story for a while. You wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine on the protests at Columbia. So can you step back and give us a sense of what led to the agreements that these schools have made with the White House? Emily Bazelon: Sure. Lots of listeners will remember that after Oct. 7 and the beginning of the war in Gaza, protests against Israel and in favor of Palestinian rights broke out at a lot of campuses across the country and really became a galvanizing cause for a lot of progressive college students. And they took different forms at different schools. A few schools ended up in the spotlight for a lot of conflict and agitation. One of those schools was Columbia. Audio of news clip: Protests took a dramatic turn at Columbia University overnight when some pro-Palestinian students occupied a building on campus. Audio of news clip: Protesters unfurled a banner and dedicated the building to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old who died in Israel's war against Hamas. Columbia was an early target of the administration freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funds at certain universities. In the name of stopping antisemitism, they say: We are going to prevent them from doing all this medical and scientific research. There's a list of schools. There was much less controversy at Brown, where things were kind of quieter. Harvard was somewhere in the middle. And so what had been a kind of tempest on campus as students tried to influence campus university policy and U.S. government policy toward Israel and Palestine became a set of questions about whether this is antisemitic. And that, I would argue, has become an excuse for the Trump administration to go after some of the elite higher education institutions, which it doesn't like anyway. Leonhardt: And I think that broader point is really important: Clearly, the forcing mechanism here has been the war in Gaza and the protests in response to it. But it feeds into this general sense, which has some basis in truth, which is that universities are very progressive places, and conservatives really don't like a lot of what happens at elite universities. This isn't just about the war. It is about the war and also other things. I assume, Emily, you think that's a fair characterization? Bazelon: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's telling that while anti-Muslim sentiment was part of the protest, a lot of Muslim students also have reported feeling less sense of belonging at their schools and a sense of Islamophobia; the Trump administration hasn't focused on any of that. The kind of excuse here, and I would argue the weaponization, has all been about antisemitism. Leonhardt: Binya, give us a sense for what these deals are. What have the universities agreed to? Binyamin Appelbaum: The deals differ by institution, but Columbia's deal basically has three parts: The first is a payment to the federal government of $200 million over the next three years. The second part is a set of commitments to alter existing policies in various ways. And the third is a set of commitments around monitoring. Those pieces are different at Brown, where there is a $50 million payment that's going toward work force development rather than the Treasury Department. In Penn's case, the deal is narrower still. It's focused on issues around trans participation in athletics. What all of the deals share is that the administration has succeeded in extracting concessions from the universities in exchange for a promise to restore existing research funding and to allow them to apply for new research funding going forward. Leonhardt: And it's interesting to me, when you go through that list, a lot of that has nothing to do with the war in Gaza —— Bazelon: Or antisemitism. Appelbaum: And if I were telling this story, I'd actually start before the war in Gaza, because it seems to me that Donald Trump and his allies have had universities, particularly elite universities, in their cross hairs for a long time. They think these schools are admitting the wrong people, educating them in the wrong way, using their influence in society in ways that are detrimental to the goals of the Trump administration or its view of what America should be. They want to remake these institutions, and I think the protests against the war in Gaza presented themselves as a convenient excuse and an opportunity to take action against a set of institutions that they would have found another way to attack if it was not this one. Leonhardt: Let's start with what I think is our area of agreement, which is the way the Trump administration is going about this is wholly inappropriate. If the Trump administration wanted to start civil rights investigations at these schools for not taking antisemitism seriously enough or for violating the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action, there are established processes for doing that. The administration could do that. The problem here is that the administration has made a bunch of accusations against these schools and completely ignored or bypassed the established processes for doing it. They've essentially held up the schools and said: If you don't do all these things and give us this money and agree to this, we are going to make your lives miserable. So the way the Trump administration is doing it is just really wrong. I think we all agree about it, but my guess is, Emily, you also have some kind of more specific thoughts from your background in covering the law about why it's so worrisome. Bazelon: I do agree. I also think it's really important to back up a little bit and think about all of the guns that the government is training on some of these schools, especially Harvard. It has frozen $2.2 billion of research funds and is also threatening the school's tax-exempt status and potentially accreditation and a fraud investigation, as well as the visas of international students. The problem for the schools is that the government has so much leverage over them that it's really hard to imagine how they can continue in their current forms as these major research institutions without making some sort of agreement with the government. And whenever you see a government have this kind of overweening power and be able to kind of force the sort of settlements we're seeing, you worry about the underlying values here and the power imbalance. The question of disproportionate punishment is important and worth dwelling on here. We're seeing these huge cuts to funding across the board, and also these other kinds of legal threats creating an impossible posture for the schools. Leonhardt: I think that then leads us to the hard questions. I think the law firms that folded to Donald Trump — and just to back up for a second, Donald Trump threatened law firms with executive orders that had some similarities to the threats he made toward universities. He said, 'I won't let your lawyers work with federal investigators,' which is a really big problem for a law firm, and a bunch of firms like Paul, Weiss folded and made deals with Trump. And a few other firms confronted Trump. They sued him. They said these executive orders are illegal, and they won very quickly. And I think those other firms that confronted Trump were doing the right thing. And the firms that folded, like Paul, Weiss, were doing the wrong thing. And a bunch of people said: Well, Columbia is essentially like Paul, Weiss. And I think this is a little bit different because I think it was much clearer that Trump was breaking the law with the law firms than it is clear that he's breaking the law with universities. Can you explain how you think about this question of whether the Trump threats are legal or not? Appelbaum: I'd actually start not with the question of whether they're legal but with another important distinction between this situation and the situation of the law firms, which is that a firm like Paul, Weiss is pretty clearly an independent, private business that happens to interact with the federal government. I don't think it is helpful to think of Columbia University or Brown or Penn or Harvard as independent, private institutions. They are, in many respects, public institutions. More than half of all of the money that they spend on research comes from the federal government. And that's an arrangement that started during World War II. And then, in the aftermath of World War II, there's a very famous report called 'Science: The Endless Frontier.' That report basically argued that the United States should formalize and maintain this relationship with universities, use them as its research arm. The U.S. funded it massively and pursued a variety of national goals in health care, in science and technology and in defense, through research funding for these universities in the succeeding decades. This marriage is really good for both sides. The universities grow and prosper and take on their present form, and the government derives huge benefits from the research that they're doing. During the same period, the government also began to massively fund the tuition that students pay to these institutions through various loan programs. What you get is a relationship that is essentially codependent, and much closer than the relationship between the government and the law firms. And so today, a Columbia or a Harvard is not in a position to say: We don't want to deal with you anymore. They are beholden to the federal government. They work in many respects for the federal government, and they found themselves over the barrel because the federal government, which has long taken a view of their purpose that was pretty closely aligned with their own view of their purpose, is now taking an adversarial view of what they should be doing, how they should be operating. It's like waking up in bed and finding out that the person who's next to you is not the person you thought, and they're really in a position where it almost doesn't matter what the law is. They're stuck. Bazelon: OK. But it's like waking up and finding that the person in bed with you suddenly turned into, like, an ogre after 70 years, when before everyone was getting along and actually the whole world was benefiting from the medical and scientific advances. And to go back to David, your question, about how legal or illegal this is. Legally speaking, these are private and independent institutions. And Harvard, which has sued, has a really good argument that this case is about the government's efforts to withhold federal funds 'as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.' There are legal protections for academic freedom that come out of the First Amendment. And there are important principles that create some independence for these universities while they continue to do this work for the government. I don't think that we want a legal regime in which the government can put any conditions it wants on a university's funding, however unconstitutional. Leonhardt: You make a good point that Harvard has sued, so the universities have fought back, but Harvard hasn't been able to win many injunctions that basically prevent these policies from going into effect. And so I think there's just a lot more legal gray area about whether this is legal or not. I've talked to people at these universities who are working on this and part of what they've said to me is, in terms of future grants, the administration has a lot of authority for what they want to do with future grants, and it just seems to me that in a long-term legal battle between the Trump administration and universities, universities are likely to lose, or at least lose a lot. That's very different from the situation with law firms, where the law firms have won. And so I really lament it. I think what the Trump administration is doing is damaging and immoral, but I'm very sympathetic to these universities deciding that if they actually fought they would lose and there would be a lot of damage along the way. I think, Emily, you're less sympathetic to them than I am. Bazelon: I feel like it is really different to sue and put some law on the books, hear from a judge, and also to pursue settlement talks and try to make an agreement for all the realistic reasons you gave, than to simply settle. One of the important principles here is that Harvard has gone to court and it has asked for expedited relief — that means a relatively quick ruling from a judge — and there was a hearing in which the judge seemed very sympathetic to the university because what the administration is doing probably is illegal. So to me it seems really important to get a ruling from that judge before there is a settlement from Harvard with the government so that we have some better answers to your questions. Leonhardt: I do think Columbia's handled this poorly for some of the exact reasons you just said, which is that they essentially settled without doing any fighting. I am more sympathetic to the notion that Harvard, while suing, might also decide to settle. Bazelon: Yeah. I do think, though, the terms of the settlements really matter, and there was an interesting contrast between the Columbia and Brown settlements on that point. Columbia agreed to turn over all its data on admissions and hiring to an independent monitor for years. That is a lot of oversight and potentially intrusion into Columbia's internal affairs. Brown, by contrast, did not agree to an independent monitor. There's a lot of ambiguity in some of the terms in these settlement agreements, which means in the Columbia case you've given an extraordinary amount of power over Columbia to this independent monitor. The Brown situation just seems better for the school going forward. Appelbaum: I think it's great that Brown was able to get a better deal, but I think Columbia was in a very difficult position. And I think one also wants to be careful about talking about whose interests are being served by these deals. There is a long-term interest in maintaining the maximum independence for these institutions. There's also a short-term interest in ending the disruption of research. There is an argument to be made if you're Columbia that your interest is in getting that funding back online as soon as possible. Even if there is some cost to your independence. Not because that's the situation you want, but because you live in a world in which Donald Trump is the president and is willing to engage in, at the very least, the outer limits of hardball — and I think we'd all agree in some instances even line-crossing in his pursuit of these objectives. They are caught in the cross hairs. What are they going to do about it? Columbia can wish that they had been offered Brown's deal, but Columbia wasn't offered that deal, and now they need to decide what to do with the offers that are on the table. Leonhardt: But Binya, you would agree that that's not the only question these institutions should ask themselves, right? I mean, law firms would say the same thing. Paramount, whose deal with Trump is really odious, they are asking the same question of what's good for our institution. I assume you would say, when a democracy's under threat, people have multiple responsibilities to consider, not just their self-interest. Appelbaum: Of course. Absolutely. To be clear, I wouldn't say that Columbia has ignored those questions. I just think it's wrestling with them under different sort of pressures than some of these other universities because it has been particularly in the cross hairs. And there was concern that if Columbia caved on all of these points it would establish a precedent that would allow the Trump administration to roll up other universities on the same terms. The early indications at least suggest that that's not necessarily going to happen — that if you're not Columbia you can get a better deal. I take some comfort in that. Bazelon: We will have to see what happens. I just feel like suing and also trying to settle is different from not going to court at all. Especially when you're thinking about setting precedents and how this is going to play out more broadly in a moment in which civil society is an incredibly important bulwark against the democracy just crumbling and falling apart. I know that sounds dramatic, but it is a moment of high drama in the United States. And when you talk to people who have looked closely at what happened in places like Hungary and Russia, this really important role that universities and law firms and companies play when democracy is under threat — there couldn't be anything more crucial, really, and it can mean taking a real hit and some real pain in the short term with a kind of uncertain medium- or long-term payoff. If we don't get some law on the books, some findings from a judge about the school's legal arguments here, that is going to be a real problem for all of us, really. Leonhardt: Let's end by looking forward on two different things. The first is the data that Columbia is going to have to give to the federal government — which I assume means it'll become public — about their applicants and their accepted students in terms of grade point average, test scores and race. And this really gets to this multi-decade fight over affirmative action in the United States. I think this is going to be a big deal. Emily, you have written in depth about affirmative action, and you've followed the cases at the court. Why is this release of data not just for this one deal but for the larger debate important? Bazelon: I'll answer briefly, but I really want to hear what you think because this is a subject you have a lot of expertise on. We've never had the kind data we're talking about from elite schools publicly available. It is going to be about race and ethnicity and not about all the other kinds of preferences that schools give, like athletics and legacy and gender — all of which we know are happening. The other thing I worry about a lot is that by having all this public, you put the schools in a position where, if they do admit Black students or hire a faculty member of color, they're going to know those decisions will be subject to special scrutiny. And I worry about a kind of chilling effect there, where you go beyond making sure that people are being treated fairly and you actually end up making it hard for these institutions to have racial and ethnic diversity, which is a really important part of the schools. It's something that, if we lose it, we're going to be actively discriminating against people of color again in admissions and hiring. David, how much do you worry about all of that with this data going public, and what else are you seeing here? Leonhardt: I'm sympathetic to the argument from conservatives that there is now a law that says schools can't use the old version of affirmative action, and I think many conservatives suspect that schools are cheating. Maybe it's not just conservatives who suspect that. I think many people suspect that. And so I'm sympathetic to the idea that schools should have to release more information so that the public, which finances these universities through large subsidies, can think about this issue. What I am deeply worried about is that we do not want to have a college admission system where we imagine that all students are trying to face the same odds and overcome the same odds. There are many students who are running with a stiff wind in their face. They attend high schools that are not like private high schools or are not like really good public high schools And so to me, schools can actually do something deeply unfair if they expect a student like that, who has run with wind in her face, to get the same SAT score as a student who's had tons of advantages, and these sort of blunt statistics may end up hiding a lot of that issue and may end up making college admissions actually less fair. That's my big worry, even as I think that it's reasonable for us to have more public debate about this. Bazelon: And to support that a little bit more, when you read the fine print of these agreements, the administration is saying that these schools may not consider essays and narrative statements about diversity if they're a proxy for race. And I'm just honestly not sure how to read that in light of the Supreme Court ruling that ended race-based preferences. The court left open having essays about adversity and/or celebration of your life that could include talking about your race and your ethnicity. And it seemed in leaving that open that there was still a way for schools to value the particular experience that students of color bring and also the hardship that they can experience that is related to race. I can't tell if this new provision in these settlement agreements just kind of restates the Supreme Court holding or whether they're actually going beyond it. And there is just some ambiguity there. Leonhardt: I would love to be wrong about this. I think the Trump administration is making a bet here that it will be difficult for Columbia and other schools to defend these numbers once they are released. If that is the case, this is more about creating a public debate than it is about a specific finding of the monitor. But we're going to have to see. Let me bring up the other issue here: There's one world in which they agree to these deals and the Trump administration essentially follows them. There's another world — and critics of the deal have pointed this out — in which they agree to these deals and the Trump administration turns around three months from now and imposes new penalties on them. That to me feels like a very different situation. Binya, I'm curious, if we do get that world in which the Trump administration starts a new investigation of Columbia and asks for $200 million more, how would that affect your thinking about this whole situation. Appelbaum: I guess I'd say the big picture here is that it's pretty clear to me that the administration isn't engaged primarily in an effort to administer punishment. It's engaged in an effort to administer policy. It wants to reshape the way that these institutions function. And I have every expectation that this is just the opening move in that effort. I would be surprised, frankly, if Columbia is now done talking with the Trump administration, because the Trump administration clearly hasn't fully achieved its goals in this area. To me, it doesn't really change the way that I think about this because I think many of the people who are most ardently opposed to this or most upset about it, they had the hope that somehow these institutions would be insulated against the Trump administration, that the consequences of the election would not reach these special institutions, that they would be able to continue functioning in the way that they had, irrespective of who was president. My big-picture view is that it really matters who wins presidential elections in this country. And yes, the law can restrain them to some extent, and perhaps it could do so more fully in this instance. But the big picture is that the Trump administration has enormous power to shift the course of higher education in this country, to change who is admitted, to change the way that they're educated, to change the research that they pursue and the services that these universities provide. We should all be alive to that danger and not operate under the illusion that these institutions can just ride out the Trump administration and not have to worry about its positions on immigration or on scientific research or on any of these other hot button issues. The lesson here isn't that Columbia is misbehaving. The lesson here is that Trump is misbehaving, and the only way to address it is to have a different president. Leonhardt: I think that's actually a great place to leave it, which is that for people who are very alarmed about these deals, there isn't some special solution where Trump is in office and this doesn't happen. The way to prevent this from happening and reversing some of the damage almost certainly involves there being a different president in office. Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@ This episode of 'The Opinions' was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@ Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
New York Times
35 minutes ago
- New York Times
The Supreme Court Has Finally Found a President It Likes
The six-member conservative majority on the Supreme Court has become a key enabler of President Trump's agenda. 'Since May, federal district courts have ruled against the administration 94.3 percent of the time,' Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford, writes in a June 25 Substack essay. 'The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7 percent of its cases. The Supreme Court is now in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration.' District court judges 'who see the evidence firsthand and hear directly from those affected,' Bonica adds, 'overwhelmingly find the administration's actions unlawful. Circuit (Appeals) courts split more evenly (68.2 percent against Trump, 31.8 percent for Trump) but still lean against the administration. Then the Supreme Court — furthest from facts, closest to power — reverses almost automatically.' Mark Graber, a law professor at the University of Maryland, described the situation by email. 'Both Republican and Democratic judicial appointees have found numerous constitutional and statutory flaws with Trump Administration policies.' Faced with this surge of lower court rulings against Trump and his appointees, Graber continued, The Supreme Court almost without exception has been braking the lower federal courts rather than the Trump Administration. This has been done largely through rulings without accompanying reasons explaining why the lower federal courts were so wrong. The result is in some cases all lower federal courts have to guide them is a sense that the Roberts Court majority does not want lower federal courts interfering with the Trump Administration. 'Universities," Graber wrote, 'fear being tied up in litigation for years. Even if they eventually win every case in the Supreme Court, the costs are likely to be substantial. If the Supreme Court permits Trump to implement his version of the law for two to three years, universities that oppose him will be damaged significantly.' In addition, Graber said, 'The Roberts court's pro-Trump series of decisions creates reason for thinking that you might lose, even as every professor in your law school tells you the law is on your side.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
