The state of Washington and Columbia River tribes are lining up in U.S. District Court to support a request for a preliminary injunction filed Oct. 14 by Earthjustice seeking emergency operational changes at federal Columbia and Snake river dams aimed at protecting endangered salmon and steelhead from harms caused by dam operations.
Earthjustice said the proposed “science-based measures” will improve salmon survival as they migrate past dams and reservoirs in the Columbia and Snake rivers. The changes include increased spill, which allows juvenile fish to pass over the dams instead of through turbines, and lowered reservoir elevations, which decreases the time salmon spend migrating through stagnant, overheated waters.
“This case is not just about salmon — it’s also about justice and a way of life,” Earthjustice wrote in a recent online briefing. “The Trump administration’s decision to tear apart this carefully crafted agreement is another dark chapter in the federal government’s history of betraying Tribes. The salmon populations our lawsuit seeks to restore are key to the region’s ecosystem, economy, and Tribal culture.”
Earthjustice represents plaintiffs National Wildlife Federation along with the state of Oregon and Nez Perce Tribe. Washington filed an Amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction on Oct. 22.
Earthjustice and the plaintiffs are also asking the court to approve a set of emergency conservation measures for what they say are some of the most imperiled populations that are on the brink of collapse. These include removing passage barriers slowing the migration of Tucannon River spring Chinook, a population that is rapidly approaching extinction, as well as increasing federal efforts to control predators like invasive walleye and some birds that prey on salmon and steelhead.
The preliminary injunction with its emergency measures would likely not have been needed if the federal government had not altered course and reneged on a Biden-era Memorandum of Understanding between plaintiffs and the U.S. government, according to court documents.
The MOU, signed in December 2023, known as the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement (RCBA), was to be effective through 2028 and was designed to restore Columbia River basin salmon and steelhead runs to “healthy and abundant levels.”
Oregon District Court Judge Michael H. Simon had approved a stay in the original and long-running lawsuit that challenged NOAA Fisheries’ 2020 biological opinion and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision as long as the agreement was in place.
However, the Trump Administration on June 12 revoked the agreement and notified the partners in the MOU in a June 24 letter. Plaintiffs in the case went back to the U.S. District Court in Oregon to ask the court to lift the stay and resume the court case that had been on pause for nearly two years
“For the Nez Perce Tribe—for the Nez Perce people—the circumstances necessitating a return to this Court are disgraceful,” the Nez Perce Tribe wrote in its memorandum to the court supporting the emergency injunction. “Endangered and threatened Snake River salmon and steelhead are essentially no better off today than when they were listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) over thirty years ago. A distressing number of populations are at or below critical abundance thresholds and others are on the literal brink of extinction.”
Although it has the power to help solve the problem, the Tribe said that the federal government instead “cynically returned to past games and tricks that this Court and the Ninth Circuit squarely rejected in prior BiOps.”
“Rather than make good on the hopeful commitments of the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which took all river users into account, the United States has withdrawn from the agreement and once again broken its word to the Tribe and the entire Pacific Northwest, both of which are defined by the very salmon and steelhead at the heart of this lawsuit.”
There is no time left, the Nez Perce memorandum said, calling on the court to intervene and supporting the plaintiffs in their call for a preliminary injunction for new operational changes at dams.
Jay Hesse, the Tribe’s Director of Biological Services, said in testimony that “the abundance of ESA-listed wild-origin salmon and steelhead returning annually to the Snake River Basin has not appreciably changed since their ESA-listing in the 1990s.”
Half have already been extirpated and nearly all the remaining populations remain below minimum abundance thresholds with no indication of reaching those thresholds anytime soon, he said.
In its quasi-extinction thresholds (QET) analysis, the Tribe concluded that 11 percent of Snake River spring summer Chinook already have abundance levels at or below QET (50), and a third of the existing Snake River spring-summer Chinook populations were below 50 natural origin spawners in 2023 and 2024.
The QET describes a population that is at a point where its persistence is uncertain and its extirpation is possible; the threshold is met when the population has 50 or fewer natural-origin spawners for four consecutive years, the Tribe said.
“But the situation is that much more dire because abundance trends show an average annual rate of decline of six percent (-6%) across all Snake River spring-summer Chinook populations over the past ten years, with many on even more calamitous trajectories (e.g., annual rate of decrease of fourteen percent (-14%) for Lower Snake Major Population Group (MPG) (Tucannon Group)),” the Tribe said. “With these trends, by 2029, 41% of Snake River spring-summer Chinook populations are predicted to be at QET (50) or to have begun the 4-year count for QET(50).
“Due to these disturbing abundances and downward trends, the prognosis is bleak for ESA-listed Snake River salmon and steelhead without urgent action.”
Although it has not challenged the preliminary injunction in court, nearly two weeks ago the Inland Ports and Navigation Group said the changes to spill and reservoir levels that plaintiffs are calling for are a danger to people and navigation that would result in disruptions in the flow of commerce “that has a highly destructive impact on our communities and economy.”
“This injunction is short sighted; increasing spill comes at an incredibly steep cost to navigation, freight movement, agriculture and the communities dependent on this river system,” said Executive Director Neil Maunu.
Plaintiffs are forcing people to trade safety, reliability, and the climate against a highly debated strategy of increasing spill on a system that already sees a high percentage of fish survival rates through the dams, IPNG said.
Filing as a friend of the court participant lining up with the plaintiffs, the state of Washington said in an Oct. 24 brief that it is fully-supportive of the preliminary injunction filing. The current BiOp “fails to adequately address the substantial impacts of the federal hydropower system on salmon and steelhead, and it would likely lead to the extinction of some populations while irreparably harming others.”
“When Federal Defendants removed themselves from the MOU they upended a comprehensive basin-wide approach to salmon and steelhead recovery through a whole-of-federal-government approach aimed at restoring healthy, abundant salmon and steelhead populations …”
Washington said that there are actions the federal hydro system operators must take now to protect ESA-listed salmon and steelhead from this higher risk of extinction.
“The hydropower operation changes and essential conservation actions requested by the Plaintiffs will improve survival of all ESA-listed interior Columbia River salmon and steelhead species,” Washington concluded in its brief. “With these changes, key ESA-listed salmon and steelhead have a better chance at persisting until this case is resolved and an effective, long-term recovery strategy is back in place.”
A week prior to Washington’s filing, the Public Power Council, an organization representing most of Washington’s public utilities, urged Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson in a letter to oppose both the reopening of the BiOp litigation case and to oppose the emergency operational changes at the dams proposed in the preliminary injunction. PPC said that “The federal court case could set back clean energy transformation and we believe there are better ways for the state and region to advance the cause of salmon recovery than in a courtroom.”
It added that just in the past few years, Washington utilities have gone from having the lowest retail electricity rates in the nation to “barely remaining in the Top 10.”
“The region’s backbone for maintaining affordability and reliability, as well as meeting Washington state’s greenhouse gas emissions targets, is our fleet of hydroelectric resources,” PPC’s letter says. About 60 percent of Washington’s electricity is generated from hydropower and “reliable, clean, and affordable hydropower, provide essential irrigation and cargo transportation, support municipal water and wastewater treatment facilities, and have helped establish a significant recreation economy.”
Although the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement did not call for the removal of the four lower Snake River dams, it did provide for the studies and economic underpinnings that would have made their removal possible.
And Earthjustice seems to believe that would have been the eventual outcome. In its online briefing, it said “Put simply, the agreement brought all the stakeholders together and was a promising step toward breaching the four dams on the Lower Snake River, where every salmon population is currently threatened or endangered.”
Filing as amicus curiae, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, which owns and operates Yakama Power, which delivers electricity to more than 3,000 customers within the Yakama Reservation, and is the only tribal electric utility in the regional Public Power Council, takes another view of public power and the need for the lower Snake River dams.
The “Yakama Nation understands the challenges of competing interests in our modern world, even as it works tirelessly to protect its fundamental First Foods from extirpation,” the Tribe said in support of the plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction.
Citing their Treaty-reserved fishing rights obtained in 1854 to retain half the salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River system (a portion affirmed in a 20th century court decision), the Yakama Tribe said that “Courts have also affirmed that Treaty-reserved fishing rights carry an inherent right to protection of the fish from man-made despoliation because a fundamental prerequisite to exercising the right to take fish is the existence of fish to be taken.”
However, those fishing rights are now constrained by non-tribal development, such as the federal Columbia and Snake river dams, and runs of salmon and steelhead are in steep decline.
“Although Yakama Nation is not responsible for the decline of Columbia River fisheries, its Members are made to bear this conservation burden,” the Tribe said.
“Today, in light of the federal government’s abandonment of the Fish Accords (the Bonneville Power Administration notified tribes that the Fish Accords would expire in Sept. 2025) and RCBA, the continued deterioration of ESA-listed salmon and steelhead populations, and Yakama Nation’s substantial concerns regarding the sufficiency of the 2020 BiOp and 2020 ROD, Yakama Nation appears before this Court in alignment with the Plaintiffs,” the Tribe said in its court filing.
“Yakama Nation supports Plaintiffs’ claims that the 2020 BiOp and 2020 ROD fail to satisfy ESA requirements, and concurs that the preliminary injunctive relief requested by Plaintiffs is both necessary and appropriate to prevent further irreparable harm to Columbia Basin fish and to Yakama Nation Treaty-reserved fisheries resource,” the Tribe concluded.
The debate via court briefs began over a month ago when Simon lifted the two-year old stay on long-running litigation challenging the federal EIS and BiOp (Sept. 11) and set a court schedule that again sets the legal battle in motion.
However, a day after the federal shutdown went into effect, federal defendants filed a motion to stay or pause the court’s schedule, saying that the appropriations act that had been funding the Department of Justice, which is representing NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the case, had expired and Department of Justice funding had “lapsed.” The government shutdown began Oct. 1 and has continued through October.
Simon denied the request Oct. 14 to delay the proceedings and set a new schedule to continue the court case. On the same day, plaintiffs filed the motion for the preliminary injunction.
In that order, Simon said that “the potential harm from granting a stay is substantial. As this Court is aware, salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin are in “a perilous state” and have been so for many years now.”
The new schedule includes: Oct. 15 — Any motions for a preliminary injunction filed by a party, and all supporting papers; Oct. 22 — Any amicus filing in support of such motion, and all supporting papers, shall be filed.
For background, see:
— CBB, Oct. 19, 2025, Judge Denies Feds’ Request To Put Salmon BiOp Case On Hold Due To Shutdown, Plaintiffs Seek Changes To Dam Operations To Aid Fish, Judge Denies Feds’ Request To Put Salmon BiOp Case On Hold Due To Shutdown, Plaintiffs Seek Changes To Dam Operations To Aid Fish – Columbia Basin Bulletin
— CBB, September 26, 2015, Judge Sets Schedule For Continuing Litigation Over Columbia River Basin Salmon Recovery; Motions, Briefs Oct. 8 To Jan. 22, 2026, Judge Sets Schedule For Continuing Litigation Over Columbia River Basin Salmon Recovery; Motions, Briefs Oct. 8 To Jan. 22, 2026 – Columbia Basin Bulletin
— CBB, September 14, 2025, Plaintiffs Return To Federal Court To Continue Legal Battle Over Columbia Basin Salmon Recovery, Judge Lifts Stay, Plaintiffs Return To Federal Court To Continue Legal Battle Over Columbia Basin Salmon Recovery, Judge Lifts Stay – Columbia Basin Bulletin
— CBB, June 13, 2025, Trump Rescinds Biden’s Executive Order Aimed At Restoring Columbia Basin Salmon, Steelhead Runs, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/trump-rescinds-bidens-executive-order-aimed-at-restoring-columbia-basin-salmon-steelhead-runs/
— CBB, January 19, 2025, COUNCIL PANEL HEARS DETAILS ON $1 BILLION ‘RESILIENT COLUMBIA BASIN AGREEMENT,’ EXTENT OF ‘COLLABORATION’ QUESTIONED, HTTPS://COLUMBIABASINBULLETIN.ORG/COUNCIL-PANEL-HEARS-DETAILS-ON-1-BILLION-RESILIENT-COLUMBIA-BASIN-AGREEMENT-EXTENT-OF-COLLABORATION-QUESTIONED/
— CBB, December 22, 2024, Agencies Taking Another Look At 2020 Eis Detailing Impacts Of Columbia/Snake River Federal Hydrosystem On Imperiled Salmonids, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/agencies-taking-another-look-at-2020-eis-detailing-impacts-of-columbia-snake-river-federal-hydrosystem-on-imperiled-salmonidsagencies-taking-another-look-at-2020-eis-detailing-impacts-of-columbia-snak/
— CBB, December 22, 2024, Council Shows Total Salmon/Steelhead Return Numbers To Columbia River Through The Years Short Of Goal; Esa-Listed Fish Continue To Struggle, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/council-shows-total-salmon-steelhead-return-numbers-to-columbia-river-through-the-years-short-of-goal-esa-listed-fish-continue-to-struggle/
— CBB, December 15, 2024, Despite Habitat Improvements Over 20 Years, Spring Chinook In Washington’s Tucannon River Still At Risk Of Extinction, Steelhead Doing Better, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/despite-habitat-improvements-over-20-years-spring-chinook-in-washingtons-tucannon-river-still-at-risk-of-extinction-steelhead-doing-better/
— CBB, December 9, 2024, Shifting Currents In Columbia/Snake River Salmon Recovery: Efforts To Save Snake River Fish Runs Likely To Look Different Under Trump, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/shifting-currents-in-columbia-snake-river-salmon-recovery-efforts-to-save-snake-river-fish-runs-likely-to-look-different-under-trump/
— CBB, October 18, 2024, Northwest Power/Conservation Council Issues Draft Annual Report To Congress On Council Progress With Fish, Power, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/northwest-power-conservation-council-issues-draft-annual-report-to-congress-on-council-progress-with-fish-power/
— CBB, June 21, 2024, Administration Report Describes Harm Of Dams To Columbia Basin Tribes, White House Sets Up Task Force To Coordinate Basin Salmon Recovery, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/administration-report-describes-harm-of-dams-to-columbia-basin-tribes-white-house-sets-up-task-force-to-coordinate-basin-salmon-recovery/
— CBB, Feb. 9, 2024, Federal Judge Approves Years-Long Pause On Basin Salmon Recovery Litigation So Parties Can Pursue Tribal-States-Feds Restoration Plan, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/federal-judge-approves-years-long-pause-on-basin-salmon-recovery-litigation-so-parties-can-pursue-tribal-states-feds-restoration-plan/
— CBB, Dec. 15, 2023, Biden Administration, Two States, Treaty Tribes Reach MOU On Columbia River Basin Salmon Recovery, Litigation Paused For At Least Five Years, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/biden-administration-two-states-treaty-tribes-reach-mou-on-columbia-river-basin-salmon-recovery-litigation-paused-for-at-least-five-years/
— CBB, July 15, 2022, White House Issues Reports On Basin Salmon Recovery, Costs; ‘Business As Usual’ Not Restoring ESA-Listed Salmon, Steelhead, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/white-house-issues-reports-on-basin-salmon-recovery-costs-business-as-usual-not-restoring-esa-listed-salmon-steelhead/
— CBB, October 22, 2021, Parties Put Salmon/Steelhead BiOp Litigation On Hold, Commit To Working Together To Find ‘Comprehensive, Long-Term Solution’ https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/parties-put-salmon-steelhead-biop-litigation-on-hold-commit-to-working-together-to-find-comprehensive-long-term-solution/
— CBB, February 5, 2021, “Conservation Groups File Complaint Against New Columbia River System Operations EIS, BiOp For Salmon, Steelhead,” https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/conservation-groups-file-complaint-against-new-columbia-river-system-operations-eis-biop-for-salmon-steelhead/