U.S. wildlife regulators approved the import of hundreds of dead elephant parts during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second administration, a shift from the agency’s practices during his first term.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency that manages rules for at-risk species, issued more than 300 African elephant trophy import permits in 2025, according to federal data obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. Trophies are animal parts — for elephants that primarily means tusks — that are collected by hunters and displayed.
That total of permits issued for 2025 — which could climb higher, the group said — is in the ballpark of the amount of elephant trophies that were imported during the last year of the Biden administration. In 2024, 359 elephant trophies came into the U.S., according to data from the center. In 2023 and 2022, there were 164 and 118 imported, respectively.
The number of permits issued in a year may not entirely line up with the actual number of elephants imported because the permits are generally valid for one year.
