March 27, 2025

Owl in America is a series of letters tracing the actions of the current U.S. administration from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. These notes follow how, in a time of rapid political and ecological change, governmental decisions are felt in the living world.

Hi all~

In all my years practicing law, I’ve only ever worked in public service. Inside a major federal agency, state and federal courts, and then the nonprofit sector, I have been surrounded by tough, smart Americans working very hard to serve the people of this country and the wild nature we’ve managed to preserve in our public lands. And though I have deep concerns about whether a democratic system so integrated with capitalism can ever truly serve the greatest good, I can state without reservation that the federal government was well-stocked with people working to make it as effective and helpful as possible. 

So, having never worked in ‘big law’ (i.e., the wealthy, corporate-defense firms), I lack an insider’s perspective on the factors going into a decision like the one this week that has shocked the legal profession: major defense firm Paul, Weiss has struck a deal with the Trump administration to escape an executive order targeting it. In my view, this does not comply with the American Bar Association’s recent guidance:

We support the right of people to advance their interests in courts of law when they have been wronged. We reject the notion that the U.S. government can punish lawyers and law firms who represent certain clients or punish judges who rule certain ways. We cannot accept government actions that seek to twist the scales of justice in this manner.

We reject efforts to undermine the courts and the profession. We will not stay silent in the face of efforts to remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not. Words and actions matter. And the intimidating words and actions we have heard and seen must end. They are designed to cow our country’s judges, our country’s courts and our legal profession.

There are clear choices facing our profession. We can choose to remain silent and allow these acts to continue or we can stand for the rule of law and the values we hold dear. We call upon the entire profession, including lawyers in private practice from Main Street to Wall Street, as well as those in corporations and who serve in elected positions, to speak out against intimidation.

If lawyers do not speak, who will speak for our judges? Who will protect our bedrock of justice? If we do not speak now, when will we speak? Now is the time. [Emphasis added] [Source]

On the heels of Trump’s orders singling out firms who have worked against him in the past, he quietly issued a memo last Friday night directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring sanctions and enforcement actions “against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States.”

What exactly constitutes “frivolous, unreasonable, or vexatious” lawsuits is open to wide interpretation by the administration. It is easy to see how environmental groups suing to enforce environmental laws or immigrant rights attorneys suing to prevent illegal deportations could be caught up. And the memo directs Bondi to review all cases brought against the government over the past eight years. The initial focus will be on firms and attorneys who have brought immigration and national security cases, but the order is not limited to those fields. 

In application, this could sweep up in its entirety the public-interest bar. That includes nonprofit groups like Earthjustice and the Center for Biological Diversity and the ACLU, plus plaintiffs’ law firms and individual lawyers who work on behalf of individual people. 

Inasmuch as our judges are standing strong against tyranny, they can only decide cases that a lawyer or law firm brings before them. If—after wide use of threats or sanctions—no one sues over an illegal deportation or a national security breach (like that seen over the past week with the Houthi attack plans Signal chat), then no judge can uphold that particular rule of law. A legal system can crumble quickly if its judges have nothing to work with.

On that note, I was pleased to see today that Judge Boasberg—who has stood firm against the administration in the Venezuelan deportation case (for which he has been attacked with impeachment)—has been assigned to preside over the first ‘Signalgate’ case. Brought by American Oversight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, against the top officials involved in the Houthi war plans chat, the case alleges the use of Signal violates federal records laws. 

American Oversight is exactly the type of legal group that could be targeted under Attorney General Bondi’s new remit. This is exactly the type of case that may never get before a judge if the organizations that would bring it there are intimidated or harassed out of existence.

It goes on.

The buffoonery and cruelty on display in the past two months—firing tens of thousands of federal employees, deporting students, reversing decades of environmental law, targeting the legal profession, bad decisions ad infinitum—is horrifying. Just this morning, I have been stabbed in the heart by:

• a video of (proud puppy-shooter) Kristi Noem gloating in front of caged men in El Salvador.
• a video showing Homeland Security agents grabbing Turkish Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk and the subsequent word that, contrary to a federal judge’s direct order not to remove her from Massachusetts without informing the court, she is being held in ICE’s processing facility in Louisiana.
• one of the first salvos in the presidential power grab intended to cement this country into a ‘competitive authoritarian’ regime: an executive order that, according to UCLA election law professor Richard Hasen, would disenfranchise millions of voters and whose goal “is voter suppression, pure and simple.”

Listen, U.S. immigration enforcement has been a stain on the earth for several presidential administrations. Our environmental laws have never functioned as intended. Our agencies have all, to some degree, been captured by the industries they are meant to regulate. The legal system has serious problems ensuring fairness and access to justice. But this weaponization and wretched destruction of our legal frameworks is more than just gleeful evil-clown stuff. It’s a deliberate chaos-mongering in order to overwhelm our civil opposition, already weakened by years of fighting a rearguard action against corporate malfeasance. It’s a move to lock down control.

International policy journalist Claire Berlinski wrote this week, in describing the United States’ rapid slide:

I’d assumed we would follow in the footsteps of Hungary or Turkey, meaning that by the end of Trump’s term, Freedom House would say the United States was “Partly Free,” and political scientists would classify us as a “hybrid state with a competitive authoritarian regime.” The reason I thought this wouldn’t happen overnight is because, until recently, I could predict Trump’s next move with a simple heuristic: What would Tayyip Erdoğan do? [Source]

Berlinski’s observation is echoed by NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat; speaking for herself and other professors of autocracy who have been shocked at the speed of power consolidation on display here, she writes:

Yet Trump and Musk are not merely creating another autocracy along the lines of Hungary or Turkey, with inspiration from South African apartheid and the Jim Crow South. They are innovating the authoritarian playbook with their power-sharing agreement and their chainsaw and wrecking-ball tactics.

The speed and scope of these authoritarian interventions surpasses the early actions of leaders such as Erdogan and Putin: they resemble the aftermath of the coups I have studied, or a process of regime change, as Anne Applebaum has also suggested.

Even if we understand the long-term dystopian political designs of Musk, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin and other technofascists, we still need language to talk about what’s happening now. We must find the right words to communicate, including to habitual non-voters, the stakes of this new kind of coup and the consequences of unleashing digital shock troops on our federal bureaucracy—the data capture and physical lockouts and purging of staff, including at the nonprofit U.S. Institute of Peace. [Source]

Deep breath.

The natural world carries on. A recent column in The New York Times reported that over 6,000 salmon swam past the sites of the four newly removed dams on the Klamath River in California and Oregon this winter, “exceeding biologists’ expectations by orders of magnitude.” To follow dam removal, federal funding was earmarked in the Biden Infrastructure Law for restoring the Klamath watershed’s upper-basin wetlands. Once a massive wildlife wonderland maintained in part by tribal action, these wetlands, when restored, will be crucial to the basin’s ecological health. 

According to the Oregon Historical Society, this “land of mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers, the Klamath Basin spans the Oregon-California state line and is larger in area than nine of the fifty states.” The University of Colorado says European settlers drained and converted to farms at least 110,000 acres of the Klamath wetlands in the early part of the 20th century. 

Although wetland restoration work had already begun under the joint efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and the tribes, the Trump administration has now frozen funding and fired many of the employees responsible for the program. Still, given the inspiring tenacity the Klamath Tribes of Oregon (and all the involved tribes) have displayed through this multi-decade process, I strongly suspect their leaders will find a new funding source and will see this work completed regardless. But that federal money sure would have helped.

Despite it all, the four dams are gone, and they’ll stay gone. Thanks be to God or Mother Nature or your deity of choice that we humans managed to finish the demolition—which was dependent in large part on federal funding—just a few months before this insane administration took the reins. The habitat restoration work will carry on, eventually. Too, nature will manage much of it on her own, as the happy surprise of more than 6,000 returning salmon has shown us.

The Times piece goes on:

As a result [of dam removal], many upper basin residents were feeling something they were unaccustomed to: hope. River-rafting outfitters began mapping out portions of the river exposed by dam removal, including steep, fast-moving rapids and newly formed streams that reflect the river’s revival. In the restored portion of the river, great blue herons have already established rookeries, and bald eagles are, as a surveying rafter put it, “all over the place.” [emphasis added] [Source]

You can’t keep a good eagle down. 

Talk to you soon.

Sources:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/how-trump-brought-competitive-authoritarianism-to-america.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5214060-trump-signs-order-targeting-mail-in-ballots-proof-of-citizenship-in-federal-elections/

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=149153

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-suspends-security-clearance-people-paul-weiss-law-firm-2025-03-15/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-prevents-abuses-of-the-legal-system-and-the-federal-courts/

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2025/03/bar-organizations-statement-in-support-of-rule-of-law/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/27/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-student-ice-video/

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/americas/kristi-noem-salvador-prison-visit-intl-latam/index.html

https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/profiles-in-cowardice

https://lucid.substack.com/p/shakedown-politics-sabotage-self

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5341540/boasberg-trump-signal-national-security-atlantic-lawsuit

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/narratives/nature-and-history-in-the-klamath-basin/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/opinion/salmon-klamath-river-dam.html

*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American

Owl in America will remain free to all readers. Paid subscriptions help make possible the time it takes to track agency notices, court filings, specialized reporting, and environmental stories that can be easy to miss. If you can support this work with a paid subscription, thank you; if you can’t, thank you for being here. Please share these letters, speak up where you can, and keep paying attention to the living world. 🦉