For Immediate Release
January 20, 2025
Contact: Libby London, 612-227-8407
(Ely, MN) – Following the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, Ingrid Lyons, Executive Director of Save the Boundary Waters, released the following statement:
“The Boundary Waters – America’s most visited and now most threatened Wilderness – is in the crosshairs of the new Administration. The evidence is overwhelming – science, law, public opinion, and economics all clearly demonstrate that copper mining has no place near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
The American people don’t want the most toxic industry, sulfide-ore copper mining, on the doorsteps of the most visited Wilderness Area in the nation – 70% of Minnesotans support a ban on this kind of toxic mining in the Boundary Waters headwaters. Regardless, undoing historic protections for this iconic landscape has become a top priority for the incoming Administration. It’s no longer a matter of if these protections will be overturned but when. Save the Boundary Waters will continue leading the fight, demanding permanent safeguards that can’t be undone by shifting political tides.”
As detailed in Project 2025 and at a rally speech in St. Cloud this past summer made by President Trump, the 20-year mineral withdrawal in the Boundary Waters watershed is being targeted for complete revocation. Proposed actions also include renewal and reinstatement of federal mineral leases to Twin Metals Minnesota and a speedy, truncated review of a new Mine Plan of Operations.
During President Trump’s first term, his Administration dismantled years of progress made toward protecting the Boundary Waters:
- The Administration reinstated old mineral leases and issued unlawful mineral leases to Twin Metals Minnesota, which is owned by Antofagasta, a Chilean mining conglomerate led by the wealthiest family in South America. This was a public lands giveaway to a foreign mining conglomerate.
- Environmental review was halted, and critical scientific and economic evidence about the risks of copper mining was ignored.
- U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue testified in Congress in front of U.S. Rep Betty McCollum of Minnesota, assuring her that the Trump administration would proceed with the two-year, science-based study of whether dangerous sulfide-ore copper mining should be permitted on federal lands immediately upstream of the Boundary Waters. In 2018, this study was halted, despite the Secretary’s testimony.
- Under pressure to release the study, the Trump administration produced a 60-page document that — but for the cover page — was entirely redacted.
- President Trump then made it the focus of a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, boasting, “We rescinded the federal withdrawal in Superior National Forest.”
In January 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration issued a Public Land Order (PLO) protecting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW or Wilderness), Voyageurs National Park (VNP), and 1854 Treaty Area from sulfide-ore copper mining for 20 years. The PLO, called a mineral withdrawal, bans toxic mining on 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest land in the watershed of the BWCAW and upstream of the Wilderness. The PLO came after the Forest Service published a comprehensive scientific review finding that sulfide-ore copper mining would pollute the Boundary Waters in ways that could not be fixed or mitigated.
The Boundary Waters is the most visited wilderness area in the United States, attracting more than 165,000 visitors from across the world. It is a major driver of the regional economy, supporting hundreds of businesses and thousands of jobs. A vast collection of peer-reviewed science shows that if a Twin Metals copper-nickel mine were built along the rivers and streams flowing into the Wilderness, pollution and environmental degradation would be certain. A peer-reviewed independent study from Harvard University showed that protection of the Boundary Waters from a proposed Twin Metals sulfide-ore copper mine would result in dramatically more jobs and more income over a 20-year period.
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