PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Lawyers for conservation groups, Native American tribes, and the states of Oregon and Washington returned to court Friday to seek changes to dam operations on the Snake and Columbia Rivers, following the collapse of a landmark agreement with the federal government to help recover critically imperiled salmon runs.
Last year President Donald Trump torpedoed the 2023 deal, in which the Biden administration had promised to spend $1 billion over a decade to help restore salmon while also boosting tribal clean energy projects. The White House called it “radical environmentalism” that could have resulted in the breaching of four controversial dams on the Snake River.
Referring to the decades-long litigation, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in Portland said it was “deja vu all over again” as he opened the hearing in a packed courtroom.
The plaintiffs argue that the way the government operates the dams violates the Endangered Species Act, and judges have repeatedly ordered changes to help the fish over the years. They're asking the court to order changes at eight large hydropower dams, including lowering reservoir water levels, which can help fish travel through them faster, and increasing spill, which can help juvenile fish pass over dams instead of through turbines.
“We are looking at fish that are on the cusp of extinction,” Amanda Goodin, an attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit law firm representing conservation, clean energy and fishing groups in the litigation, said during the hearing. “This is not a situation that can wait.”
In opposing arguments, an attorney for the federal government said “there's not a linear relationship that more spill equals more benefit” for salmon.
In court filings, the federal government called the request a “sweeping scheme to wrest control” of the dams that would compromise the ability to operate them safely and efficiently. Any such court order could also raise rates for utility customers, the government said.
The lengthy legal battle was revived after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement last June. The pact with Washington, Oregon and four Native American tribes had allowed for a pause in the litigation.
The plaintiffs, which include the state of Oregon and a coalition of conservation and fishing groups such as the National Wildlife Federation, filed the motion for a preliminary injunction, with Washington state, the Nez Perce Tribe and Yakama Nation supporting it as “friends of the court.” The parties have described salmon as central to Northwest tribal life.
The Columbia River Basin, spanning an area roughly the size of Texas, was once the world’s greatest salmon-producing river system, with at least 16 stocks of salmon and steelhead. Today, four are extinct and seven are endangered or threatened. Another iconic but endangered Northwest species, a population of killer whales, also depend on the salmon.
The construction of the first dams on the Columbia River, including the Grand Coulee and Bonneville in the 1930s, provided jobs during the Great Depression as well as hydropower and navigation. They made the town of Lewiston, Idaho, the most inland seaport on the West Coast, and many farmers continue to rely on barges to ship their crops.
Opponents of the proposed dam changes include the Inland Ports and Navigation Group, which said in a statement last year that increasing spill “can disproportionately hurt navigation, resulting in disruptions in the flow of commerce that has a highly destructive impact on our communities and economy.”
However, the dams are also a main culprit behind the decline of salmon, which regional tribes consider part of their cultural and spiritual identity.
Speaking before the hearing, Jeremy Takala of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council said “extinction is not an option.”
“This is very personal to me. It's very intimate,” he said, describing how his grandfather took him to go fishing. “Every season of lower survival means closed subsistence fisheries, loss of ceremonies and fewer elders able to pass on fishing traditions to the next generation.”
The dams for which changes are being sought are the Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite on the Snake River, and the Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day and McNary on the Columbia.
FILE - Water spills over the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, which runs along the Washington and Oregon state line, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski, File)
FILE - Water moves through a spillway of the Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River near Almota, Wash., April 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios, File)
FILE - This photo shows the Ice Harbor dam on the Snake River in Pasco, Wash, Oct. 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Jackie Johnston, File)
BEIRUT (AP) — When the Israel- Hezbollah war broke out in early March, Hussein Shuman fled the heavy bombardment of the southern suburbs of Beirut, but he didn’t bother trying to rent an apartment elsewhere.
In areas deemed “safe” because the Lebanese militant group has no presence, he feels that Shiite Muslims like him are not welcome. Residents regard them with suspicion as potential Hezbollah members, and landlords charge exorbitant prices to rent to displaced families.
Instead, the 35-year-old, who works at a perfume company, headed to central Beirut where he set up a small tent where he has been staying, along with his wife, 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.
Shuman even rejected an offer from a friend who invited him to bring his family to the Christian mountain town of Zgharta. He preferred to remain in his tent, even though it has flooded twice in the past two weeks.
“By staying here I have my dignity and respect,” Shuman said, sitting on a chair near his tent as a barber gave him an open-air hair cut. “We will not stay in a place where we are going to be humiliated.”
In a country full of suspicion, the more than 1 million people — most of them Shiite — displaced as a result of Israel’s evacuation orders and airstrikes have limited options.
Some landlords in Christian areas refuse to rent to Shiites. Others demand inflated rents and deposits that few can afford. Fatima Zahra, 42, from Beirut’s southern suburbs, said she and her sister sold their finest jewelry to pay the $5,000 the landlord charged up front for two months’ rent.
In some Beirut neighborhoods, displaced people who can afford to pay high rents are only allowed to take the apartment after landlords inform the security agencies to check on whether the family has any links to Hezbollah.
Sectarian tensions are a sensitive issue in Lebanon because the country fought a 15-year civil war ending in 1990 that largely broke down along sectarian lines.
Social frictions have worsened since Israel’s targeted airstrikes killed Hezbollah officials or members of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in predominantly Christian, Sunni and Druze areas, raising fears among the hosts that Hezbollah members are mingling within the civilian population.
The Lebanese are deeply divided over Hezbollah’s wars with Israel, with many in the small nation blaming the Iran-backed group for dragging the country into a deadly conflict that has so far left more than 1,300 people dead and over 4,000 wounded. Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel two days after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, triggering the ongoing Middle East war.
The renewed war has caused widespread destruction and paralyzed the economy at a time when Lebanon is still in the throes of a historic economic crisis that broke out in late 2019. The country has not yet recovered from the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024.
In mid-March, an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in the town of Aramoun killed three people, prompting some local residents to call for the displaced to leave the area.
Days later, an airstrike on the nearby town of Bchamoun also killed three people, including a four-year-old girl, who were displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
In neither case did Israel announce the intended target of the strikes, but neighbors assumed that someone in the targeted apartments was a Hezbollah member.
“Had we known that they were linked to Hezbollah, we would have kicked them out,” an angry man who owns an apartment in the building in Bchamoun said at the scene.
In late March, a missile exploded over the predominantly Christian Keserwan region north of Beirut, with debris falling on different areas. Although the Lebanese army later said that it was an Iranian missile passing over Lebanon that fell, many initially assumed that it was an Israeli airstrike targeting displaced people.
No one was was hurt by the missile debris, but a group of young men attacked displaced Shiites in the district of Haret Sakher near the coastal city of Jounieh, calling for their eviction, before local officials intervened.
“We don’t want them here,” shouted a Haret Sakher resident shortly after the strike. He said that some of the displaced refer to their hosts as “Zionists,” accusing them of being aligned with Israel because they criticize Hezbollah for dragging the country into the conflict. He added: “We don’t want national coexistence.”
George Saadeh, a member of Jounieh’s municipal council, told The Associated Press that he had called on Haret Sakher residents to avoid any reaction “so that we can preserve civil peace.”
In a predominantly Christian area just north of Beirut, plans to house displaced people in an abandoned warehouse near the port were suspended last week after drawing backlash from lawmakers and residents.
“The Israeli targeting campaign has created a lot of paranoia,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. “If you see a displaced person, maybe you wonder, ‘What if this person is a target?’”
Fearing the tension could slip out of control, the army has beefed up its presence on the streets.
Last week, army commander Gen. Rudolphe Haikal toured Beirut and the southern city of Sidon and told troops that they should be “firm in the face of any attempt to undermine internal stability,” the army said in a statement.
Police forces, including a SWAT unit, were deployed at major intersections in the capital to preserve peace and prevent any friction between the displaced and locals. Police patrols pass through the tent city by Beirut’s coast where Shuman and his family are staying.
An official at the municipality of the predominantly Sunni town of Naameh, just south of Beirut, said that they have received thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon.
The official said that in order to avoid tensions, they opened a school in one district for displaced Shiites and another in a different neighborhood for people displaced from Sunni border villages.
“There are concerns among people,” that conflict could break out said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
With the Israeli airstrikes and ground invasion mainly targeting Shiite areas, U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a Lebanese-American, was criticized for stoking sectarianism. He told reporters in late March that the U.S. had asked Israel for a commitment that Christian villages in southern Lebanon will not be attacked.
“We have asked the Israelis to leave Christian villages in the south alone and they told us that they will not touch Christian villages,” Issa said. However, he added, “They (Israelis) said that they cannot guarantee” that the villages would be left alone “if there is infiltration into these villages” by Hezbollah members.
Several Christian villages in southern Lebanon have asked displaced Shiites who were sheltering there to leave, fearing that their presence might trigger Israeli attacks.
Legislator Taymour Joumblatt who is the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, the largest Druze-led political group in the country, said that the biggest concern in the country now is “strife.”
“The most important thing is to reduce sectarian pressures on the ground,” Joumblatt said. “Our Shiites brothers are part of this country and our humanitarian duty is to help them.”
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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre contributed to this report from Beirut.
FILE — A displaced woman who fled Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, carries her belonging as she moves to a better spot to shelter from the rain, past an Arabic anti-war poster that reads, "Sacrificing for whom? Lebanon does not need war," in Beirut, Saturday, March 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
FILE — A child walks past tents sheltering people displaced by Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, along the Beirut waterfront in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
File — Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
