Shelby Park was once a popular spot for locals to play soccer or walk their dogs along the Rio Grande. Today National Guard troops from Texas patrol the park that – now rimmed with spiraled wire – is seen as a front line in a national debate over U.S. border security.

The municipal park in Eagle Pass, Texas, has been transformed in recent months in an escalation of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a border security effort now 3 years old. The state’s use of National Guard and other state law enforcement has ratcheted up tensions with the federal government. 

The state seized the park from the city unexpectedly in January, and the Department of Homeland Security accused Texas of blocking U.S. Border Patrol agents from accessing it. Governor Abbott visited in February alongside 13 fellow Republican governors, many of whom are sending members of their National Guard to support Texas’ border initiative. Former President Donald Trump also praised the state’s “military operation” when he visited Shelby Park in February. 

National Guard deployment to the border isn’t new. For decades, governors and presidents of both parties have called up these troops to support local, state, and federal agencies. What’s new, say legal experts, is a state’s use of the National Guard as an overt political challenge to federal immigration authority. Dangerous, unlawful border crossings, meanwhile, continue.

“The use of the Guard for things that are customarily federal duties, coupled with the political environment we’re in, coupled with the renewed assertion of states’ rights – to me, it’s more than somewhat problematic,” says Joshua Kastenberg, a former Air Force lawyer and judge, now professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law. 

From militias to National Guard 

The National Guard, a state-based, reserve U.S. military force, grew out of militias that predated the nation. Congress introduced standardized training and federal funding in 1903, helping transform the National Guard into a modern force. National Guard troops are now deployed regularly across the United States, including for natural disaster response, COVID-19 testing, and recently the patrolling of the New York City subway. Massachusetts activated up to 250 National Guard troops last summer to help migrants access food and medical care at shelters. 

Governors, the president, and Congress can all activate the National Guard. The federal government is prohibited from using the National Guard as a civilian police force (unless authorized by the invocation of a law like the Insurrection Act). States, however, generally have more leeway. 

Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle/AP

National Guard troops and other law enforcement are stationed at Shelby Park, March 20, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Within a state role, the National Guard has “always been able to support, or even function, in a law enforcement capacity,” says Joseph Miller, senior historian at the National Guard Bureau. 

After Border Patrol tracked a record-high number of migrant encounters along the southern border in December, Texas installed itself in Shelby Park the following month. The state refused to comply with a Department of Homeland Security “cease and desist” letter demanding full access, which alleged that the presence of state troops in Shelby Park obstructs federal Border Patrol operations. 

Texas’ actions “improperly seek to regulate the federal government,” persisting “even in instances of imminent danger to life and safety,” Jonathan Meyer, general counsel for the U.S. government, wrote in the letter.

Also in January, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration in a 5-4 vote, allowing federal agents to cut through state-installed wire in order to perform their duties.

The ruling also left key concerns unanswered around the broader state-federal conflict. The court “could have answered the questions” of whether Texas’ use of its National Guard is unconstitutional, “but courts don’t do those things unless they have to, usually,” says William Banks, professor emeritus at the Syracuse University College of Law. 

“No state can use the National Guard in a way that offends the United States Constitution, or the supremacy of federal law,” says Professor Banks. “What’s going on now in Texas, viewed a certain way, is Abbott is interfering in a federal power over immigration.”

Border authority 

Texas officials say they’ve taken these actions out of necessity, due to the federal government’s neglect of its border security responsibility. Migrants have crossed illegally in record numbers during the Biden administration, with an average of 2 million annual Border Patrol encounters along the entire southern border since 2021, the highest levels on record.

“Until President Biden steps up and does his job as Commander-in-Chief to secure the border, Texas will hold the line and use every tool and strategy to keep our country safe,” Governor Abbott said in a statement last month.

The Texas governor’s office says the state’s efforts are paying off, citing “over 503,800 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 40,400 criminal arrests.” Critics cast Operation Lone Star as ineffective, subject to civil and human rights abuse, and expensive. The first two years of the operation cost around $4 billion, according to news reports. Further appropriations passed by the state legislature could push the state’s border spending to over $11 billion through 2025. 

Border Patrol encounters have dropped along the Texas-Mexico border over the last five months compared with the same period last fiscal year, although encounters are rising elsewhere in Tucson, Arizona, and San Diego, California, sectors.

Two-thirds of Texas voters support the deployment of more state police and military resources to the border, according to a February poll. The Texas Military Department did not respond to a request for comment, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the record. 

Along the Texas-Mexico border, the use of state troops expands beyond Eagle Pass. 

Further west, on the border in El Paso, a viral video released by the New York Post in March shows a crowd of migrants, several with their hands raised, pushing past Texas National Guard members. (Under U.S. law, individuals may apply for protections like asylum, even if they entered illegally, as a defense against removal.)

Courtesy of Amerika Garcia Grewal

Crosses commemorating migrants who died in the Rio Grande, installed by local organizers, line Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, December 2023.

To Adolpho Telles, the El Paso County Republican Party chairman, the incident represents an “attack on this country.”

“The Texas National Guard should not have to be doing what they’re doing, but because the president is not living up to his pledge to support the Constitution of the United States, the state of Texas needs to protect its citizens,” says Mr. Telles.

Governor Abbott has also announced plans to build a military-style base to house National Guard troops on 80 acres of land in the Eagle Pass area. The site will be able to hold up to 2,300 service members previously located in hotels around the region. Meanwhile, some locals say the state’s show of force is excessive. They also want their park back.

With Shelby Park generally closed to the public, the Eagle Pass City Council moved their upcoming solar eclipse festival to another venue, according to the Eagle Pass Business Journal. The city’s mayor told local media that the park was taken over by the state without notice or consent. 

The saga is emblematic of a broader trend around state challenges to federal authority, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, a local who helps organize vigils at the park that honor migrant lives lost in the Rio Grande.

“It has the potential to tear our union apart,” says Ms. Garcia Grewal. “Here in Eagle Pass, Governor Abbott has found a pressure point, and he’s hammering it on as hard as he can. And he’s sending cracks out throughout the entire United States.”

The Department of Justice has so far resisted suing Texas over its takeover of Shelby Park and restrictions on Border Patrol agents. The Biden administration has considered litigation, but doesn’t want to further escalate conflict, according to NBC News. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has sued Texas over other efforts to expand state immigration authority. Litigation is ongoing over a buoy barrier installed by Texas in the Rio Grande, and a new law that would permit state officials to arrest and deport migrants who crossed the border illegally. 

“Let’s ... put the guardsmen in there”

Texas isn’t alone in calling up its National Guard to manage its border. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs in December authorized the state National Guard to assist border counties with fentanyl and human trafficking enforcement. “Arizona has borne the burden of federal inaction in managing the State’s southern border,” the Democratic governor wrote in an executive order. 

“We’re ready to support as long as needed,” says Capt. Erin Hannigan, spokesperson for the Arizona National Guard. The length of time depends on the “governor’s office and the counties that are requesting this support.” 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Assistant Fire Chief Rodolfo Cardona poses in Eagle Pass, Texas, Feb. 26, 2024. First responders from the fire department often find migrants in distress, he says.

For this fiscal year, the Department of Defense has also authorized the use of up to 2,500 National Guard troops to support federal immigration authorities along all four southern border states, mobilized from around half of all U.S. states and Guam. These border missions have been exercised by both red and blue commanders in chief.

“It’s nothing new,” says Victor Manjarrez Jr., director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso and a retired Border Patrol official. 

For instance, starting in 2006, Dr. Manjarrez recalls coordinating up to 6,000 National Guard troops at the southern border under Operation Jump Start. Launched by Republican President George W. Bush, the mission aimed to offset a deficit of Border Patrol agents, he says, by placing the National Guard in roles that didn’t involve patrolling the border.

“We took a good count of, ‘hey, what [Border Patrol] agents are doing nonagent things’” like vehicle maintenance, for example, he says. “Let’s get the agents out in the field; put the guardsmen in there.”

Local first responders 

Back in Eagle Pass, state and federal personnel are not the only ones patrolling the Rio Grande. Local first responders also run their own missions. Eagle Pass emergency management services can still access the river, yet state-installed barriers along the banks mean that missions, including medical aid for those injured or body recovery for those who died, take longer, says Rodolfo Cardona, assistant fire chief.

The city’s emergency management coordinator stresses that, politics aside, the humanitarian crisis at the border continues. So does the mental health toll that his workers – and law enforcement – have increasingly borne while responding to illegal crossings. The crisis includes migrant children found injured, beaten, and raped.

“I don’t think it was ever a priority on our federal government’s mind – of the aftermath, and the toll it takes on not only us, but Border Patrol, the military, and everybody else,” says Mr. Cardona. 

“All of this is tragic, in more ways than one,” he says. “These are human beings.”

Ismael Abu Dayyah/AP

A vehicle with the logo of the World Central Kitchen, wrecked by an Israeli drone strike, sits on the coastal road in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, April 2, 2024. Seven aid workers from the international charity were killed in strikes on three vehicles, leading it to suspend delivery of vital food aid to Gaza.

The shock waves of the lethal Israeli military strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy are creating fresh obstacles for humanitarian workers in Gaza who continue to fight famine even as they themselves are at risk.

The local humanitarian workers, who lack the protections of international organizations, have been left shaken by the strikes on the WCK staff, whom they had befriended. They say a suspension in operations by aid agencies in Gaza poses more obstacles to their mission.

“The airstrike on the WCK convoy elicited a range of emotions: fear, sadness, and outrage,” says Aisha Salem, a manager at the Economic & Social Development Center of Palestine, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization that distributes food parcels in southern Gaza. “It underscores the serious risks we face daily as we carry out our mission to alleviate suffering and provide aid to those in dire need.”

On Friday came signs some relief could be on the way.

Following a tense phone call between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel announced a “temporary opening” of the Erez Crossing with northern Gaza and the use of the port of Ashdod to receive Gaza-bound aid, with the potential to massively increase food and assistance to the besieged strip.

Also Friday, Israel announced that two officers – a colonel and major – had been sacked, and three others including a general had been reprimanded, following a preliminary military investigation into the drone strikes on the convoy.

Courtesy of @chefjoseandres/X/REUTERS

World Central Kitchen workers prepare food for Palestinians in Gaza in this picture released March 21, 2024, and obtained from social media.

Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary-General Jan Egeland, in an interview with BBC World Service Radio, described the temporary border opening as a “watershed moment.”

“I think it’s a turning point, and I think the aid will flow freely,” he said. “I’m glad the most recent tragedy [the WCK incident] has woken up the capitals of the West. I think they [Israelis] have understood that their current policy is counterproductive.”

Yet international NGOs operating in Gaza expressed caution, stressing that the issues of security, coordination with the Israeli military, and a cumbersome screening process imposed by Israel that has slowed aid to a trickle have yet to be resolved.

And the dangers to aid workers remain.

Groups suspend work

In the wake of the killing of one Palestinian and six international aid workers in marked WCK vehicles, the charity suspended its operations in Gaza, citing Israel’s inability to ensure its staff’s safety.

A ship laden with 240 tons of Gaza-bound WCK aid was turned back to Cyprus. In five months, the agency had delivered more than 40 million meals across Gaza.

American Near East Refugee Aid, which was serving 150,000 meals per day across Gaza, also halted its operations this week.

According to one humanitarian coordinating the international aid response in Gaza, more international organizations in Gaza “are considering suspension” in wake of the strike, with the full impact on international aid agencies’ work in Gaza yet to be felt.

The reduced activity makes the efforts of Palestinian men and women still trying to keep their communities alive more difficult – and more vital.

Ahmed Abu Sultan, a project coordinator at the Wefaq Association for Women and Child Care, a local charity that partnered with World Central Kitchen, would go to the WCK storage facility in Rafah twice weekly to load his truck with rice, cooking oil, and lentils to then prepare hot meals that would be packaged and distributed across Rafah.

Courtesy of the Wefaq Association for Women and Child Care

Ahmed Abu Sultan (center with sunglasses) from the Wefaq Association charity oversees a recent aid distribution to families in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. He says he's concerned that the World Central Kitchen's suspension of work in Gaza will decrease his own organization's capacity to deliver meals.

There he befriended Australian Zomi Frankcom, one of the seven killed in the Israeli strike, whom he described as a “dynamo” full of positivity with a contagious smile.

“Seeing international organizations in Gaza gave us some comfort,” he says. But their killing “shook us. Some volunteers stopped coming out of fear of being attacked. People with foreign nationalities have been killed. This means that I can easily get killed” as a local NGO worker, he says they reason.

With the WCK suspending its work, Mr. Abu Sultan now relies on two smaller donor organizations, cutting back on Wefaq’s meal service.

“I am afraid that this will affect our kitchen’s operations. This will reduce the number of hot meals we produce for displaced and needy people in the Gaza Strip,” he says.

UNRWA teams “terrified”

UNRWA, the largest humanitarian organization on the ground in Gaza, has had 176 staff members killed in the war, many in the line of duty – the most United Nations staff killed in any conflict.

“Our teams are absolutely terrified,” says UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma. “What happened is a testament that no one is safe in Gaza even if you are an aid worker wearing your gear, driving a marked car in a coordinated deconflicted route. You are not safe.”

UNRWA convoys have twice been hit when attempting to reach northern Gaza on a prescribed secure route.

“We had hoped foreign nationals would be able to provide aid to us without being exposed to the dangers by the Israeli military,” says Fatema Abu Atta, program officer at Aisha Society, a women’s organization that provides family support services.

“The killing of WCK workers has shaken my confidence in international humanitarian law,” Ms. Abu Atta says. “It all seems to be one big lie.”

Petros Karadjias/AP

A ship belonging to the Open Arms aid group, loaded with canned food destined to Gaza, is docked after returning with undelivered aid to the port of Larnaca, Cyprus, April 3, 2024.

Mohammed Nairab, director of Palestinian Environmental Friends, currently handing out food parcels to displaced families in camps along Gaza’s coast and in Rafah, says Tuesday’s strike “highlights the urgent need for increased protection of humanitarian workers.”

Without protective gear or armored cars, the most dangerous part of the job distributing aid, the workers say, is traveling on roads and through neighborhoods that can be hit with missiles or shelling at any moment.

While international organizations like the WCK have deconfliction arrangements and share the coordinates of their movements with the Israeli military, Mr. Abu Sultan, and many humanitarian workers like him, use public transportation every day.

Lives “shattered daily”

Also daunting, the local aid workers say, is the constant anxiety and worry over the safety of their loved ones in evacuee centers and tents.

“The decision to leave my family behind to assist those in need weighs heavily on me,” says Mr. Nairab.

Many local humanitarian workers and U.N. staff have lost family members to Israeli missile strikes, but they continue their work.

Their own safety, the workers stress to the Monitor, is a secondary concern.

Their priority: fighting against famine and a humanitarian situation deteriorating by the hour, a race against the clock to save whomever they can.

“Lives are being shattered daily, and the humanitarian crisis deepens with each passing moment,” says Mr. Nairab. “Urgent action is needed to ensure the timely delivery of assistance to save lives.”

“The urgency of the situation and the pressing needs of vulnerable populations compel us to push through our fear,” adds Ms. Salem, the Palestinian NGO manager. “We are determined to make a difference.”

“These are people who have lost families, homes, they fear for themselves and their children, and yet they still continue to risk their lives to deliver babies, [and] hand out medicine and bags of flour,” says UNRWA’s Ms. Touma. “These are heroes.”

Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this report from Ramallah, West Bank.

Andrew Morton stood in the sun on the smokestacks of a blast furnace the day the Francis Scott Key Bridge opened on March 23, 1977, watching the first cars cross the bridge. For him, the moment had a profound resonance. One of many steelworkers at the Bethlehem Steel Corp. at the north end of the bridge, he’d surely forged some of its metal.

Forty-seven years later, nearly to the day, Mr. Morton woke up on March 26 to videos he couldn’t believe. The Key Bridge had collapsed after it was hit by a cargo ship. “I could not believe that within seconds it was up, and within seconds it was down,” says Mr. Morton.

Not only did Mr. Morton and other residents of Sparrows Point play a role in building the bridge, but also it’s what connected them to the other side of the Baltimore harbor. The town’s roots are inextricably linked with the history of Bethlehem Steel, a manufacturing titan at its height in the 20th century.

Mr. Morton was hired by Bethlehem Steel on June 25, 1970. At its height, the mill on Sparrows Point employed 31,000 people. He was signing on to a legacy company in a town with a rich history. Construction on the mill began in 1887, built on a salt marsh. For over a century it powered the local community, building a company town modeled after the industrial towns of New England. Schools, stores, a hospital, even a police force – everything was operated by the mill. Mr. Morton planned to work there for only one summer. He stayed over 40 years.

With all eyes on the wreckage of Key Bridge, Sparrows Point has reentered the spotlight. Today the mill is gone, replaced by warehouses for Amazon, Under Armour, and McCormick & Co. As the economic powerhouses driving the region shifted, so did the community ethos. Still central to that is the legacy of Bethlehem Steel, at one point the largest steel mill in America, which helped build World War II ships and iconic landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge.

The history of the community forged by Bethlehem Steel is more than one of camaraderie and grit. It’s also one of civil rights struggles and unionizing. And its evolution from a past built from steel to a more uncertain future – from an economy founded on building stuff to one powered by buying stuff – is one that will echo with hollow familiarity in former manufacturing centers all over the United States.

“Baltimore has a reputation as an industry town and as a manufacturing town. But fundamentally, we’re a port town, and that’s one thing that the bridge’s collapse has really driven home,” says Anita Kassof, executive director of the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

AP/File

America's largest port of entry for foreign cars, Dundalk Marine Terminal in the Baltimore harbor, seen here Aug. 17, 1971, had more than 1,000 imported cars coming in each day. Seen in the background, Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Sparrows Point plant stood idle due to a lack of orders for steel.

Sparrows Point “was an absolutely self-contained town, segregated by economics and race. But it was such that the families of the mill workers were right there. So it really was like a family, both metaphorically and in fact,” says Ms. Kassof.

The company town was demolished in the 1970s, and employees of Bethlehem Steel were left to relocate themselves. The land has long been redeveloped with small homes on winding streets in Edgemere, a neighborhood locals include in Sparrows Point. A wooded state park covers a stretch of coastline. The town is home to a dollar store, a senior center, and a handful of bars and restaurants. Across the creek is Turner Station. Bethlehem Steel’s Black employees lived in the neighborhood of small brick row houses during the decades when the work crews and neighborhoods were segregated, something Mr. Morton recalls.

“Everybody used to work at the mill”

Though the mill closed in 2012, many residents of Sparrows Point and Turner Station worked there or have family members who did. “Everybody used to work at the mill,” says Jim Rehak, a contractor from Sparrows Point. 

Kimberly Schoeberlein and her husband live on a street in Edgemere named after her husband’s family. His grandfather was a heater at Bethlehem Steel. 

SOURCE:

Map data from OpenStreetMap

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Key Bridge was another point of local pride. When it collapsed last week, it felt personal to many here – and its absence has isolated them. Mr. Rehak commutes across the harbor for a job in Annapolis. It now takes him nearly twice as long.

“We lost a major artery to get to the rest of the world,” says Ms. Schoeberlein. “It feels like we’re disconnected.”

A real estate agent in Sparrows Point, she has already spoken to people concerned about property values and some considering moving across the harbor.

The bonds have remained strong for Mr. Morton and other former Bethlehem Steel employees who still live in Sparrows Point and Turner Station. Mr. Morton, in particular, has never strayed far from the legacy of the mill. In the 1990s, he took a computer science college class. He learned coding and built a training module that the company paid to use for new workers – making him a union worker with an outside contract. Since the mill closed, Mr. Morton, who has a photographic memory and used to stay after work to sketch machines, built a complete virtual reality model of the mill, down to the nuts and bolts.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Andrew Morton holds a photo of a 3D model he built of the top of the coke oven battery in the old mill, April 4, 2024. Mr. Morton worked for Bethlehem Steel for more than 40 years before it closed down.

He and others also remember the less idyllic parts of the past – the racism and segregation.

“I wasn’t the typical ’60s and ’70s Black employee,” says Mr. Morton. “I would never have been able to handle the discrimination that those guys had to take.”

Mr. Morton’s own relationship with his fellow steelworkers was often mentor-mentee. “Some of those guys took me under their wing and became like fathers to me.”

“I think we’re going to lose our little town”

Bill Barry, a retired labor studies professor and local historian, has interviewed more than 100 former steelworkers. They were divided evenly on whether they would want their children to work there. “Your grandfather worked there; your father worked there; you could work there,” he says.

That sense of pride mixed with resentment for some when the company declared bankruptcy and finally closed.

“They all went to the same schools; they went to the same churches. It was a traditional American industrial community,” says Mr. Barry. “Everybody knew everybody around, and I don’t think that’s true anymore. Communities have fractured.”

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

A massive Amazon warehouse now covers much of the land where one of the furnaces operated by Bethlehem Steel once sat in Maryland.

To some, like Mr. Morton, the departure of the mill has contributed to a loss of local identity. Darlene Lumpkin, who grew up in Sparrows Point, sees a similar pattern. She loves the area, calling it her “Mayberry,” but traffic and redevelopment feel like they’re taking over. “I think we’re going to lose our little town,” she says.

Baltimore is the westmost port on the East Coast, says Ms. Kassof. The companies now operating out of Sparrows Point – which also include FedEx and Harley Davidson – require a different type of labor and produce a different product, she notes. But they chose the location for many of the same reasons as Bethlehem Steel: the deepwater port and easy access to roads and railroads headed to the Midwest.

In all, more than 12,000 people work at the warehouses and other businesses that occupy the old mill site.

The flavor of Sparrows Point, no longer loyal to a single employer, is changing. “The steel industry was incredibly skilled,” says Mr. Barry. “People were proud of it. I’m not sure that the work that’s there now has that kind of skill.”

The Schoeberleins used to be able to see the bridge from their bedroom window. Today, the empty sky is a constant reminder that, at least for now, they’re isolated. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge has turned their focus even more to their immediate community. Ms. Schoeberlein sits on a local business owners board, where members are trying to anticipate needs that Sparrows Point might fill or ways the community could adapt to a possible influx of workers here to rebuild the bridge.

For Mr. Morton, it was his fellow steelworkers who first made him feel like this was his home. “The guys that trained me – I call them my blast furnace fathers,” he says.

They were bonded by a shared sense of danger, thrill, and pride. “We workers had that feeling of a kind of invincibility – that we were the big boys on the block and no one could topple us,” he says. “I remember older workers telling me, ‘Maryland can’t survive without Bethlehem Steel.’”

Above a herd of elephants in the Selati Game Reserve in South Africa, helicopter pilot Jana Meyer and wildlife veterinarian Hayden Cuthill scan the bush for the most worthy-looking bull elephant.

Once their target is selected, Ms. Meyer deftly maneuvers her aircraft to separate the animal from the herd. Dr. Cuthill quickly estimates the male’s weight and prepares the tranquilizer dose. He fixes the ampul atop a special dart, which he shoots directly into the male’s left flank.

A team on the ground will collect the elephant’s sperm as part of an ongoing international effort to improve elephant fertility, a project called Operation Frozen Dumbo. The samples collected in the wild are cryogenically frozen and shipped to a consortium of European zoos, which use them to artificially inseminate their females.

This avoids the importation of wild elephants.

Factors such as poaching, habitat destruction, and climate change have decimated wild African elephant populations and pushed the animals into endangered-species territory. The Frozen Dumbo project aims to bolster elephant populations in the wild and in the world’s zoos.

Back at Selati, the sedated male – dubbed The Sperminator – issues a series of loud grunts. A volunteer keeps the tip of his trunk dilated with a wooden stick to ensure the animal’s breathing.

Elephants draw air exclusively through their trunks, so if anything blocks this double-channel pathway, the animal could quickly die. Elephants cannot breathe through their mouths like other land mammals – a trait inherited from their aquatic ancestors.

This is the fifth day of the Selati sperm-collecting expedition, which has been largely unsuccessful.

Everyone on the team is relieved when an ultrasound performed by the project’s lead scientist, Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, shows the animal’s reproductive potential to be high. His semen is extracted into vials that will then be flown by helicopter to a field lab to be gradually frozen. These will be shipped to a cryobank at ZooParc de Beauval in France.

Dr. Hildebrandt, who has overseen the successful artificial insemination of more than 50 female elephants, is passionate about his goal: “We have to stop populating the European zoos with animals from the wild,” he says. “Instead, we only need to import the sperm and the egg cells.”

Matjaz Krivic

Thomas Hildebrandt (left) and Miguel Casares, a veterinarian at Bioparc Valencia, prepare to collect an elephant’s semen.

Matjaz Krivic

Dr. Hildebrandt and Frank Göritz (right), both of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, perform an ultrasound on an elephant to gauge the amount of his sperm.

Matjaz Krivic

Veterinarian Hayden Cuthill prepares to shoot a tranquilizer dart into a male elephant below, in Selati Game Reserve in South Africa.

Matjaz Krivic

Sperm is stored in nitrogen tanks at minus 196 C (minus 320 F) and is ready to be shipped to European zoos.

Matjaz Krivic

Dr. Hildebrandt analyzes a thawed sperm sample before injecting it into an elephant cow at Bioparc Valencia.

Matjaz Krivic

Scientists and conservationists collect samples for the Frozen Dumbo project’s cryo sperm bank.

Matjaz Krivic

Miri, shown here at Bioparc Valencia, was born through artificial insemination.

Reuters

People on top of The Empire State Building in New York City watch a solar eclipse in 2017.

Like peas in a pod, the sun, moon, and Earth will line up April 8 to cast a 115-mile-wide shadow moving from Texas to Maine. The rare solar eclipse is expected to bring more people together than the Super Bowl or perhaps the Fourth of July. Small towns are putting on their best hospitality for millions of visitors from the cities. In Ohio, the Knox County Association for Remarkable Citizens plans to bring together people with and without disabilities for an inclusive community experience (picnic included).

For just a few minutes, a cosmic spectacle across North America will create a great mingling of diverse strangers. Political divisions will seem trivial compared with the heavenly wonder. “This year’s eclipse, I pray, just might nudge our fractured nation in a hopeful, unified direction,” wrote David Baron, former chair in astrobiology at the Library of Congress, in The Washington Post.

The awe of an eclipse is known to elicit the best in viewers – who wear the proper shaded glasses. A study of a 2017 eclipse in the United States by the University of California, Irvine found people were less self-focused, more social, and more humble, based on social posts at the time.

This moment of a cohesive America, however, may reflect a reality that itself is often eclipsed by politics and the news media. Americans actually have a pretty faulty belief that they are more divided than they are told, according to deep-dive surveys of private opinion by the think tank Populace.

“Across race, gender, income, education, generation, and 2020 presidential vote, there is stunning agreement on the long-term national priorities that Americans believe should characterize America,” Populace has found.

There is remarkable consensus on priorities such as health care, community safety, criminal justice reform, and infrastructure. Action on climate change is ranked third in priorities; yet when asked what most other Americans would believe, people say climate action only ranks 33rd.

In other words, on many issues, there is a false polarization that could evaporate with more honesty. That’s not the case on a few issues, such as illegal border crossings, abortion, and a living wage. Yet somehow, Americans just do not realize that other people want most of the same things that they want.

“We have this sense of our civil society sort of breaking down and that maybe people just don’t care anymore, and it’s not true,” Todd Rose, CEO of Populace, told the Class Disrupted podcast. “I just don’t see how we solve our problems when we’re keeping quiet about the things that matter most to us.”

The Populace surveys find Americans choose character attributes over public status. By a supermajority, they want to be involved in a community – even if only a third are engaged in their community at the level they want. 

Perhaps it takes the shared experience of a solar eclipse to shed light on what Americans share in values and interests. People do really want to get along. For a few minutes on April 8, they will see how it can be done.