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      Protests at Glacier as national parks reel from Trump cuts: ‘They’ve gutted staff, gutted funding’

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      Dozens of former rangers, park volunteers, and local residents protested at the gateway to Montana’s Glacier national park on Wednesday against the staff cuts and hiring freezes that have thrown many national parks into crisis, including Glacier.Current and former staffers and watchdog groups say the cuts have meant staff are not able to keep up the facilities and infrastructure. Some say the park has been left with inadequate infrastructure and too little staff to be able to respond to emergencies.Although it might look to visitors like operations in Glacier are normal, “it’s like walking down a Hollywood movie set where the front looks great but there’s nothing behind it,” said Sarah Lundstrum, Glacier program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association.The protesters held signs, chanted and waved at tourists during a visit to the park from the Congressional Western Caucus. Hosted by the Montana Republican congressman and former interior secretary Ryan Zinke, the caucus came to the park to showcase the success of the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, which secured federal funding for protection and maintenance of public lands.Montana’s Republican senator Steve Daines championed that bill during Donald Trump’s first term, calling it “the greatest conservation win for Montana and the entire country in 50 years”. In May, Daines introduced the America the Beautiful Act to extend federal funding for projects to address crucial maintenance backlogs.But congressional support for funding projects in national parks comes at a jarring disconnect with the Trump administration’s slashing of jobs at national parks countrywide, including at Glacier, where an already overworked staff has been left with little to no bandwidth to implement projects.No congressional Republicans, including Daines or Zinke, have spoken up against the cuts and freezes, and all voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that rescinded $276m from the National Park Service (NPS).“We’re supporting the park, but drawing attention to the fact our policymakers are grandstanding in a national park where behind the scenes they’ve gutted staff and gutted funding,” said Suzanne Hindler, one of the rally’s organizers. She said organizers specifically chose to hold the event outside the park to avoid adding more work for already overburdened park staff during peak tourist season.Hindler emphasized that funding for national parks was crucial. But without the staff to execute the work, new problems would arise with no one to fix them, she said.Jan Metzmaker, a longtime park employee who was on Glacier’s first all-women trail crew in the 1970s, said: “I can see the deterioration in the services and in the facilities.“They really need to put some money into those, because this place is crazy with people. It’s being loved to death. But there’s no way that they can do the maintenance and all the things that need to be done in the park now.”Visitation to national parks reached a record 331.9 million last year. But because of the Trump administration’s hiring freezes, terminations, and buyout and early retirement offers, US national parks have lost nearly a quarter of permanent staff, with seasonal hiring behind by nearly 8,000 positions. Further staff cuts, described as “deep and blunt” and “aggressive and swift” by National Parks Traveler, the multi-media outlet that covers the NPS, are held up in court but may still be forthcoming.In Glacier, which has seen a 7.5% increase in visitors from last year’s record high, the park is trying to operate with a 25% loss of staff. Vacancies span from chief ranger and fire positions, wildlife scientists, multiple environmental impact analysis positions, and emergency services, to mechanics, electricians, plumbers and IT positions.View image in fullscreenAfter the federal government canceled all national parks’ internet contracts this year, Lundstrum said, Glacier now uses StarLink, which some staffers say is spotty, goes down entirely, and often fails to connect park dispatch and 911 calls. There’s only one IT person remaining to address technical problems, those staffers, who asked to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation for speaking out, in a park that spans the Continental Divide, has no cell service, and regularly sees lost and injured hikers and encounters with wildlife, including the park’s dense population of grizzly bears.On top of that, said a current park employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, there are no longer enough staff to safely respond to emergencies. It’s only luck “that the park hasn’t had any big events this year”, they said. “In past years we’ve had big fires, major search-and-rescue operations, really critical injuries. It’s only a matter of time until there’s an event we can’t respond to appropriately and there’s a mass failure of a system.”And yet the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, issued an order in April requiring all parks to remain “open and accessible” despite the reduced staff. In Glacier, that might come at the cost of visitor and staff safety.The Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the concerns the staffers and watchdog groups raised. The offices of Zinke and Daines also did not respond to a request for comment.The staffers say that remaining staff are doing “twice the job they used to”. Law enforcement are covering twice their previous area, maintenance workers are doing jobs they are not trained for, and outside recreation operators, such as Glacier Guides and Montana Raft, are emptying trash and cleaning bathrooms at river accesses to make up for the gaps. The mentality inside the park, said the employee, “is that if you’re the only one left, you’ll do whatever you can to help”.The Association of National Park Rangers reported that “amid federal budget cuts, some seasonal employees at Yosemite national park worked for as long as six weeks without pay in recent months as park supervisors struggled to manage hiring”.One of the rally attenders, a local woman named Kathy who asked not to be identified by her last name, is a volunteer with the Glacier National Park Association. “We do restoration, painting, backcountry patrol, visitor center, vehicle reservations. We want to do things, but unfortunately, we don’t have enough supervisors – rangers – to have volunteers.”“It feels like the government is setting us up to fail,” said the Glacier employee.Experts worry that Trump’s budget proposal to cut 36% of the national park budget, which could force the closure of up to 350 park units, is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the park system as an excuse to sell those lands for profit.“Hollowing out staffing, cutting budgets, changing priorities – all of that very much lends itself to the idea of essentially causing those agencies to fail at meeting their mandates, and that will lead to the call for privatization,” said Lundstrum. “Because if the government can’t manage that land, then obviously somebody else should, right? In documents like Project 2025, there are calls for the privatization of land, or the selloff of land.”Multiple sources say that morale among Glacier staff is low. “The civilian federal workforce used to be non-partisan, so you always felt like you could have your opinion – liberal or conservative – without fear of retribution,” said one employee. “And now the undertone is to stay under the radar. If you speak up and say, ‘this is wrong’, you pretty much have a target on your back.”One young mother who came to the rally with her two small sons asked not to be identified because her husband is a federal employee; just this month, the justice department fired an official whose husband developed a phone app that tracked Ice agents.“Having these two little guys is just a constant reminder of how much our world is changing, and the need to stand up for it. Everything could be gone in a blink,” the mother said.Glacier is also the national park poster child for climate change, as its namesake glaciers are predicted to be completely gone in the coming decades. Yet the administration, without any pushback from congressional Republicans, has cut and scrubbed climate science and reversed Biden-era initiatives to curb climate change.In his press release, Daines said he introduced the America the Beautiful Act “so that people can get outside and enjoy the natural beauty we’re lucky to have here in the US”, and that he was “proud” to “protect our outdoor way of life for generations to come”.Hildner said she was not fooled. She said: “To see capitalism as the driving force for managing lands, rather than conservation, is really terrifying: for myself, for what it means for future generations, and what it means for the planet. How do we as a public help the folks who’ve been elected to govern see what the real costs are?” More

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      Trump’s presidential philosophy is government by shakedown | Steven Greenhouse

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      Americans have long glorified their constitution and the rule of law. But Donald Trump’s volatile and vindictive presidency has increasingly replaced that philosophy with something very different – call it “governing by shakedown”.Trump has often violated federal law, and sometimes the constitution, as he has sought to throttle his targets – whether universities, law firms or US trading partners – in the hope that they will cry uncle and agree to his demands. This style of governance would make any caudillo proud. But it should make anyone who cares about the rule of law – and avoiding authoritarian rule – very worried.By threatening to cripple this university’s finances or that country’s exports, Trump has become the global emperor of shakedowns. It has been great for him and his ego. He dominates negotiations and news cycles, and his White House cheerleaders rush to proclaim victory whenever he reaches a deal with one of his targets.Claiming that many universities haven’t done enough to combat antisemitism, Trump has demanded that Harvard, Columbia, Brown and other schools submit to his rightwing vision. Furious that some law firms have hired people or filed lawsuits he didn’t like, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to attack them unless they submitted to his demands. Trump has wreaked havoc on global diplomacy and supply chains by threatening America’s trading partners with stratospherically high tariffs unless they reached trade deals with Washington.Far too many Americans – whether senators, the media or the public – fail to realize that Trump’s attacks on these institutions evidently violate the law. Federal district courts have ruled in four cases that Trump’s broadsides against law firms violate their free speech rights. The US court of international trade ruled that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs against dozens of countries were illegal, concluding that Congress hadn’t given him “unbounded authority” to slap tariffs on nearly every country. (The administration is appealing that ruling.)As for Trump cutting off billions in aid and research grants to universities because of their alleged failures in responding to antisemitism, many legal experts say his administration has plainly failed to comply with anti-discrimination laws that require the government to follow specific procedures before penalizing universities, such as giving schools an opportunity for a hearing. Moreover, federal law says the government can halt funding to only particular university programs where noncompliance has been found, and not, for instance, to scientific research far afield from that.Last week, Trump expanded his shakedown efforts. He told the chipmaker Nvidia that he would let it sell high-end AI computer chips to China only if it paid 15% of the revenue from those sales to the US treasury. Nvidia agreed, even though Trump’s demand was of dubious legality; the constitution prohibits the government from placing a tax on exports.Trump also threatened Brazil with a 50% tariff unless it stopped prosecuting its rightwing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for allegedly seeking to overturn Brazil’s presidential election. When Brazil’s current president rejected that demand, saying that Trump shouldn’t be telling a sovereign democracy how to run its justice system, Trump imposed the 50% tariff. Trump’s move is an outrage because he’s seeking to strong-arm a longtime US ally over how to run its justice system and because, as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said, this is “far outside his legal authority”.Many lawyers voiced shock and dismay when the law firm Paul, Weiss, a litigation powerhouse, reached a deal with Trump instead of fighting him. Paul, Weiss promised to provide Trump with $40m in pro bono legal services after he sought to cripple the firm by suspending its security clearances and barring its lawyers from federal buildings. All told, nine law firms have reached deals with Trump, promising nearly $1bn in pro bono services . Some legal experts call these deals illegal – one Yale law professor said “a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract”.Columbia has reached a $221m settlement with the Trump administration, while Brown reached a $50m deal. While denying any liability, Columbia vowed to “work on multiple fronts to combat” antisemitism and other “forms of hatred and intolerance at Columbia”. The university also pledged not to use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions and said its admissions policies would be merit-based and wouldn’t “unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin”.Columbia officials hailed one part of the deal – the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze $1.3bn in funding. That freeze was devastating Columbia’s research programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia, denounced the deal, saying it “gives legal form to an extortion scheme”. Pozen described it as the “first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures”. Pozen slammed this deal-by-deal style of governance as “coercive”, “arbitrary”, “deeply susceptible” to “corruption” and “corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself”.We shouldn’t be shocked that Trump acts this way. He loves dealmaking and lording it over others and he has long paid scant heed to following the law. But we should be shocked by the way the two other supposedly co-equal branches of government, Congress and the supreme court, have behaved. They have essentially rolled over in the face of Trump’s ruling by shakedown.Republican lawmakers in Congress have cravenly sat on their hands while Trump has boosted inflation and sabotaged economic growth by forcing tariffs on more than 90 countries, notwithstanding the strict restrictions Congress set on when and how a president can impose tariffs. Republicans have vowed never to raise taxes, but let’s not fool ourselves: Trump’s tariffs are a regressive sales tax that hits non-affluent Americans hardest. Republican lawmakers have also been quiet as mice while Trump has used a wrecking ball to threaten leading universities – institutions that played a vital role in making the US a world leader in medicine and many other fields of research.The supreme court has been strangely, worrisomely silent while Trump rules by shakedown, even as many district court judges have shown plenty of spine, ruling, for instance, that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs and assaults on law firms are illegal. When the supreme court wants to move quickly, it often finds a way. It would be great if the court moved to protect the rule of law, universities and academic freedom from Trump’s shakedowns. The court could and should issue a ruling as soon as possible that Trump violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by egregiously failing to follow its requirements before freezing universities’ funding. Similarly, the court could greatly reduce the economic mayhem that Trump’s tariffs are causing by quickly upholding the US court of trade’s ruling that Trump has far overstepped his authority to impose tariffs. But the high court been shamefully passive, even submissive.Congress and the supreme court need to wake up, step up and lay down the law. They must stop Trump’s rule by shakedown, which far too often involves capricious, vindictive dealmaking and ignores our legal rules and standards. Americans need to realize that Trump’s style of governance is dangerously eroding our rule of law and democracy.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Canada finally faces a basic question: how do we defend ourselves? | Stephen Marche

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      The second Trump administration has been worse than Canada’s worst nightmare. The largest military force in the history of the world, across a largely undefended border, is suddenly under the command of a president who has called for our annexation. Canada could not be less prepared. The possibility of American aggression has been so remote, for so long, that the idea has not been seriously considered in living memory. Donald Trump has focused on economic rather than military pressure, but the new tone in Washington is finally forcing Canada to ask itself the most basic question: how do we defend ourselves?For most other countries in the world, self-defence is the key to national identity. Canada’s immense good fortune has been that we haven’t really needed a strong military to build our country. In the war of 1812, we were British, and the British kept us alive because we were British. There hasn’t been an attack on our homeland since. Confederation, the founding of the country, was the result of a political negotiation rather than a conquest or a violent independence movement. Our military was based on a fundamental assumption about our place in the world, and the nature of the world itself. Our place in the world was to contribute to the global order. The global order shared our fundamental values. Peacekeeping was more our style than defense.Recently, I’ve been working on Gloves Off, a podcast about how Canada can protect itself from any threat emanating from the US, and from every other country in the world now that the US is no longer our protector and guardian. The consensus from military and security experts is that we would be “a snack”.It is far from unusual for countries sliding toward authoritarianism, such as the the United States, to use foreign engagements to justify the suspension of their own laws. Trump has already started trumping up crazy excuses for anti-Canadian sentiment – a supposed flow of fentanyl over the border and other nonsense. His ambassador says Trump thinks our boycotts make us “nasty” to deal with.So what does Canada need to do to develop the capacity to defend itself?The good news is that Canada’s new reality is far from unique. In fact, it’s the historical norm. Finland is a potential model for us. It has lived its entire existence next to a belligerent country that is either expanding imperially or collapsing dangerously. The Finns do not have nuclear weapons. They are only 5.5 million people, next to Russia’s 143 million.Finland’s strategy is whole society defence. Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and a reserve commander of an armoured personnel carrier, explained that whole society defence does not pretend to be able to overcome a potential Russian onslaught. “Power asymmetry is an absolutely essential factor in the Finnish security thinking,” he told me. “Given how much bigger Russia is, in order to thwart that potential threat, we need to mobilize broadly the resources available in society.”Because Finland is geared, throughout its national institutions, towards self-defence, its resistance to Russia is credible. The idea is not to match Russian military capacity, but to make the conquest of Finland not worth the trouble. “Full societal resources of a smaller nation can actually be enough to thwart the potential threat from a larger power because the costs for the larger power to invade could actually be much higher than the potential benefits it would gain from such an invasion,” Pesu explains. The more capable a country is of causing pain to occupiers, the less likely the occupation happens in the first place.Conscription is essential. The Finns can put a million soldiers in the field within 72 hours. But every facet of Finnish government, from the healthcare system to the national broadcaster, has a role in the security system, and knows its role in a possible military conflict. “A preparedness mindset permeates the whole society,” Pesu says. “From the state level all the way to an individual living somewhere in the country.”To rise to Finland’s level, Canada would need to reorchestrate its entire frame of reference. The prime minister, Mark Carney, has recently announced serious boosts to national military spending: 2% by the end of this year, rising to 5% at some point in the future. But the government has pushed its readiness targets back to 2032. And those are targets that align with our typical military practices: meeting our commitments to our alliances. That money sounds good on a theoretical level. But the Canadian military situation has not fundamentally altered. We have not reset our position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe period we are entering is a period of deep chaos, of the weakening of international institutions, of multiple, interlocked collapses. Any reliance on international institutions and their restoration is a false hope. If Canada is to remain a stable democracy, we will have to find the stability in ourselves. A whole society defence would bolster us against the chaos that threatens us from every side and from within. In an era of splintering society, conscription is a force of unification, what Pesu calls “a strong democratic linkage”. Canada is a big country, with huge geographical and demographic diversity. We are as vulnerable as any other society to the informational chaos that is overtaking the world, to the incipient breakdown. A whole society defence would be a massive force for unification. It would establish, to Canadians at least, that there are crises we are going to face and we need to face them collectively. The thing about a whole society defence is that it determines that you are living in a whole society, a society that needs defending.Canada has no history of needing to defend itself. In fact, not needing a military is baked into our national identity – and that creates a psychological bind. To preserve who we are, we have to overcome one of our oldest tendencies, one of our best tendencies: our peace-loving nature, our idea of our country as an escape from history rather than its perpetrator or victim.And that leads to a very scary question: what will be the crisis that makes us realize that we need whole society defence? Let us hope it won’t be Canada’s last.

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Federal judge orders closure of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail

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      A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.The ruling is a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and a native American tribe that sued the state of Florida and the federal government. Williams agreed that the hasty, eight-day construction of the jail at a disused airfield in late June damaged the sensitive wetlands of a national preserve and further imperiled federally protected species.“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government, and there are consequences for ignoring them.”The alliance plans to hold a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the ruling in detail.Conversely, the ruling is a blow to the detention and deportation agenda of the Trump administration. The president touted the camp, which recently held as many as 1,400 detainees, as a jail for “some of the most vicious people on the planet”, although hundreds of those held there have no criminal record or active criminal proceedings against them.There was no immediate reaction to Williams’s ruling from the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), or from the Department of Homeland Security.But lawyers for the state told Williams in court last week that they would appeal any adversarial ruling, the Miami Herald reported.In addition, hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities at the weekend in anticipation that Williams would order its closure, the outlet said.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, announced earlier this month that the state will soon open a second immigration jail at a disused prison near Gainesville to increase capacity. More

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      The Trump administration wants to use the military against drug traffickers. History suggests this may backfire

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      In early August, US President Donald Trump signed a not-so-secretive order to make plans for the use of US military force against specific Latin American criminal organisations.

      The plans were acted upon this week. The US deployed three guided-missile destroyers to the waters off Venezuela, with the authority to interdict drug shipments.

      This was not exactly a surprise move. During his inauguration in January, Trump signed an executive order designating some criminal groups as foreign terrorist organisations. At the time, he told a journalist this could lead to US special forces conducting operations in Mexico.

      Weeks later, six Mexican cartels were added to the foreign terrorist list, as were two other organisations: MS-13, an El Salvadoran gang and particular focus during Trump’s first presidency, and Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang and frequent target during Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024.

      Read more:
      What is Tren de Aragua? How the Venezuelan gang started − and why US policies may only make it stronger

      In May, two Haitian groups were added to the list. Then, in July, another Venezuelan organisation known as the Cartel of the Suns was added to a similar list because of its support for other criminal groups.

      Fentanyl brings a new focus on organised crime

      Illicit substances have flown across the US-Mexican border for more than a century. But the emergence of the synthetic opioid fentanyl has shaken up US responses to the illicit drug trade.

      Highly addictive and potent, fentanyl has caused a sharp increase in overdose deaths in the US since 2013.

      Successive US governments have had little success at curbing fentanyl overdoses.

      Instead, an emerging political consensus portrays fentanyl as an external problem and therefore a border problem.

      When the Biden administration captured Ismael Zambada – one of Mexico’s most elusive drug barons who trafficked tonnes of cocaine into the US for 40 years – he was charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl. Even progressive independent Bernie Sanders has pivoted to claiming border security was the solution to the fentanyl crisis.

      But focusing on border security will do little to improve or save lives within the US.

      Tougher border measures have never effectively curtailed the supply of other illicit substances such as cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine.

      These measures do little to reduce harm or dependency within the US, where a largely unaccountable pharmaceutical industry first pushed synthetic opioids.

      The question remains just what can be achieved by US military operations.

      How to spot a cartel

      While the chemical emissions from fentanyl labs are easily spotted by drones, cartels and their operatives are decidedly more difficult to identify.

      Criminal organisations in Mexico tend to be loose networks of smaller factions. They don’t operate in strict hierarchies like corporations or armies.

      The decentralised nature of these networks makes them extremely resilient. If one part of the chain is disrupted, the network adapts, sourcing materials from different places or pushing goods along different trafficking routes.

      But US and Mexican security agencies often act as though cartels follow rigid hierarchies. The so-called “kingpin strategy” focuses on killing or arresting the leadership of criminal organisations, expecting it to render them unable to operate.

      However, this strategy often exacerbates violence, as rival factions compete to take over the turf of fallen kingpins.

      Combating criminal groups with the military has already been a spectacular failure in Mexico.

      Former President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels in 2006, but his government lost credibility for leading Mexico into a war it could not win or escape.

      Tens of thousands of people are now killed every year, a dramatic increase from the historically low homicide rates in the years leading up to 2006. More than 100,000 have disappeared since the beginning of the war.

      Outside interventions also run the risk of increasing support for criminal groups.

      In my research, I’ve found cartels sometimes market themselves as guardians of local people, successfully positioning themselves as more in touch with local people than the distant Mexican state.

      Cartels can also certainly make the most of deep antipathy towards US intervention in Mexico.

      All cartels are not equal

      Deploying warships off the coast of Venezuela will have minimal impact on the fentanyl trade.

      Fentanyl enters the US from Mexico and even from Canada – but Venezuela doesn’t feature in US threat assessments for fentanyl.

      Military action against the Cartel of the Suns will also be largely ineffectual, as this group exists in name only.

      Research has found this isn’t an actual cartel – rather, the name describes a loose network of competing drug-trafficking networks within the Venezuelan state. Figures in the government certainly have ties to the illicit drug trade, but they are not organised in a cartel.

      In Mexico, however, the cartels do exist – albeit not as imagined by the US government.

      Given the US has invaded and seized territory from Mexico in the past, US military intervention has minimal prospect of support from Mexican governments.

      Current President Claudia Sheinbaum has shown a willingness to accommodate the Trump government on matters of fentanyl trafficking. She has deployed thousands of members of the National Guard to police the border and major trafficking centres, such as the state of Sinaloa.

      The Mexican government has also made two mass extraditions of captured crime bosses to the US. As with the capture of Zambada by the Biden government, this is likely to be used as evidence the US is winning the battle against fentanyl.

      Then again, these crime bosses could be put to other uses.

      The US government recently returned an imprisoned leader of MS-13 to El Salvador, even though he was indicted for terrorism in the US.

      This move was part of the deal-making between the US government and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.

      The US government may be eager to take the fight to organised crime, but sometimes political expediency is a bigger priority. More

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      Tit-for-tat gerrymandering wars won’t end soon – what happens in Texas and California doesn’t stay there

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      Congressional redistricting – the process of drawing electoral districts to account for population changes – was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a once-per-decade redrawing of district lines following the decennial U.S. census. Today it has devolved into a near-constant feature of American politics – often in response to litigation, and frequently with the intent of maintaining or gaining partisan advantage.

      Polls show widespread public disapproval of manipulating political boundaries to favor certain groups, a process known as gerrymandering. However, we currently see little hope of preventing a race to the bottom, where numerous states redraw their maps to benefit one party in response to other states drawing their maps to benefit another party.

      The most recent round of tit-for-tat gerrymandering began in Texas. After drawing their post-census congressional maps in 2021, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, at President Donald Trump’s behest, are advancing a new set of maps designed to increase the number of Republican congressional seats in their state. The goal is to help Republicans retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections by converting five Democratic seats to ones that will likely result in a Republican victory.

      In response, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing to redraw his state’s map. Under Newsom’s plan, Democrats could gain five House seats in California, offsetting Republican gains in Texas. The California Legislature approved the new maps on Aug. 21 and Gov. Newsom signed the bills that day. Next, the maps will be presented to California voters on the November 2025 ballot for approval.

      Newsom vows that he isn’t trying to disband the independent redistricting process that California enacted in 2021. Rather, he proposes to shift to these partisan gerrymandered maps temporarily, then return to independent, nonpartisan redistricting in 2031.

      Democrats in Illinois and New York, and Republicans in Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina, have signaled that they may follow Texas and California’s leads. Based on our research on politics and elections, we don’t expect that the wave will stop there.

      Gerrymandering dates back to struggles over U.S. foreign policy in the early 1800s and is named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Elbridge Gerry.

      Rules for mapmakers

      Redistricting has always been an inherently political process. But the advent of widespread, easily accessible computer technology, increasingly predictable voting patterns and tight partisan margins in Congress have turbocharged the process.

      There are ways to tweak this gerrymandering run amok and perhaps block a bad map or two. But none of these approaches are likely to stop partisan actors entirely from drawing maps to benefit themselves and their parties.

      The most obvious strategy would be to create guardrails for the legislators and commissions who draw the maps. Such guidelines often specify the types of data that could be used to draw the maps – for example, limiting partisan data.

      Anti-gerrymandering rules could also limit the number of political boundaries, such as city or county lines, that would be split by new districts. And they could prioritize compactness, rather than allowing bizarrely-shaped districts that link far-flung communities.

      These proposals certainly won’t do any harm, and might even move the process in a more positive direction, but they are unlikely to end gerrymandering.

      For example, North Carolina had an explicit limitation on using partisan data in its 2021 mapmaking process, as well as a requirement that lawmakers could only draw maps in the North Carolina State Legislative Building. It was later revealed that a legislator had used “concept maps” drawn by an aide outside of the normal mapmaking process.

      In a world where anyone with an internet connection can log onto free websites like Dave’s Redistricting to draw maps using partisan data, it’s hard to prevent states from incorporating nonofficial proposals into their maps.

      Courts and commissions

      A second way to police gerrymandering is to use the courts aggressively to combat unfair or discriminatory maps. Some courts, particularly at the state level, have reined in egregious gerrymanders like Pennsylvania’s 2011 map, which was overturned in 2018.

      At the national level, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims presented “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts” and ultimately were better suited to state courts. There are still likely to be claims in federal courts about racial dilution and other Voting Rights Act violations in gerrymanders, but the door to the federal courthouse for partisanship claims appears to be closed for the time being.

      A third option is for states to hand map-drawing power to an independent body. Recent studies show that independent redistricting commissions produce maps that are more competitive and fairer. For example, a nonpartisan scholarly review of the 2021-2022 congressional and state legislative maps found that commissions “generally produce less biased and more competitive plans than when one party controls the process.”

      Commissions are popular with the public. In a 2024 study with political scientists Seth McKee and Scott Huffmon, we found that both Democrats and Republicans in South Carolina preferred to assign redistricting to an independent commission rather than the state Legislature, which has been in Republican control since 2000.

      Studies using national polling data have also found evidence that redistricting commissions are popular, and that people who live in states that use commissions view the redistricting process more positively than residents of states where legislators draw congressional lines.

      A national solution or bust

      While redistricting commissions are popular and effective in states that have adopted them, current actions in California show that this strategy can fail if it is embraced by some states but not others.

      Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for tit-for-tat gerrymandering. Litigation can help at the margins, and independent redistricting can make a difference, but even the best intentions can fail under political pressure.

      The only wholesale solution is national reform. But even here, we are not optimistic.

      A proportional representation system, in which seats are divided by the portion of the vote that goes to each party, could solve the problem. However, removing single-member districts and successfully implementing proportional representation in the United States is about as likely as finding a hockey puck on Mars.

      A national ban on gerrymandering might be more politically palatable. Even here, though, the odds of success are fairly low. After all, the people who benefit from the current system would have to vote to change it, and the filibuster rule in the Senate requires not just majority but supermajority support.

      So, brace for what’s about to come. As James Madison famously observed, forming factions – groups of people united by a common interest that threatens the rights of others – is “sown in the nature of man.”

      Gerrymandering helps factions acquire and retain power. If U.S. leaders aren’t willing to consider a national solution, it won’t disappear anytime soon. More