Jaguars -- the animal, not the vehicle -- used to be in the United States, but we killed them all. There are still 600 or so jaguars in the Santa Rita mountains of Northwest Mexico, and sometimes, they roam into the United States. They're definitely there; someone shot and killed one there in 1965, and we've taken pictures of others there as recently as 2012 and 2013. (There have been other confirmed photographs of jaguars in the United States more recently that aren't mentioned in the opinion, but whatever.) That said, it's pretty much demonstrably true that jaguars don't currently live and breed here; we've historically made sure of that.
The question at issue in this opinion is whether it should stay that way. The Rosemont Copper Company wants to build a big copper mine and copper processing facilities in the Santa Rita mountains in Arizona. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated that area as a critical habitat for the jaguar, and it's likely that Rosemont's proposed copper mine and associated processing facilities wouldn't exactly be all that inviting to jaguars. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service nonetheless approve Rosemont's proposed development of the area.
At which point an environmental group (the Center for Biological Diversity) filed a lawsuit to stop the project, and Rosemont filed a cross-claim saying that the jaguar shouldn't even be protected in the first place.. The district court found largely in favor of the environmental group, the losers appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and in a split opinion, the Trump and Bush appointees (Judges Forrest and Ikuta) found in favor of Rosemont and said that the jaguar shouldn't be protected at all, whereas the Biden appointee (Judge Holly Thomas) thought that the jaguar should be protected but that a remand was required to evaluated the potential impacts of the copper mine.
Here's the (potential) upside of the opinion: We get another copper mine in the United States. Here's the (potential) downside: We're almost certainly not getting jaguars back. Pretty much ever.
But, hey, There are 600 left in Mexico. Plus some others deep in the Amazon, if you can find 'em before we try to deforest the whole thing. So no biggie.
