A lawsuit filed Wednesday by the National Park Conservation Association alleges that the National Park Service broke the law by greenlighting mining operations in the Mojave National Preserve when President Trump took office amid a long-running dispute with agency officials.
“The Mojave National Preserve belongs to the American people, not an international mining company,” Chance Wilcox, the organization’s California desert program manager, said in a statement.
Conservation groups have raised the issue of the Colosseum Mine, where workers dug for gold and silver until the 1990s. The open crater is located in the Clark Mountains, which provide habitat for bighorn sheep and are estimated to have the second highest density of rare plants of any mountain range in the state.
Australia’s Dateline Resources Ltd. acquired the mine in 2021, telling shareholders it would focus primarily on gold mining, but also explore rare earth elements for use in electric vehicles, wind turbines and defense systems. The company soon became embroiled in a dispute with the National Park Service, which manages the preserve, according to hundreds of pages of letters and emails released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the National Park Conservation Association. And was shared with The Times last year.
Those documents say that in 2022, the Park Service informed company officials that the mine was operating without authorization and demanded that it cease operations until it submitted an operations plan and received agency approval. This generally will give the Park Service an opportunity to analyze the environmental impacts of the proposed work and add terms and conditions to conserve park resources.
In response, company representatives argued that the Park Service had no basis for requiring a permit or a new plan of operations because the activities were already authorized under an existing approval issued by the Bureau of Land Management in 1985, the correspondence stated. The BLM managed the land before the Mojave National Preserve was established in 1994.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, claims that after President Trump took office, the Park Service suddenly changed its stance and moved forward with the mine without a valid plan of operations or the necessary permits and approvals.
In addition to the Park Service and the Interior Department, the conservation union’s lawsuit names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Acting Park Service Director Jessica Bowron and Acting Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Kevin Schluckebier.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is among the officials named in the lawsuit.
(Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The Interior Department declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Park Service and Dateline Resources did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
According to correspondence obtained by the Times last year, the Park Service also sought to recover $213,387 in costs and damages arising from two incidents in which Dateline and its contractors allegedly did road work without permits, destroying sensitive lands and destroying hundreds of plants.
But after years of back-and-forth with Dateline, the Park Service last April — shortly after Trump took office — informed the company that it would no longer have to seek agency authorization to continue mining, according to the lawsuit. Mojave National Preserve officials also rejected a demand that the company pay for damages caused by road construction, the lawsuit says.
A warning sign at the Colosseum Mine in San Bernardino County.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Trump promoted the project on Truth Social last May, and Burgum endorsed it Fox News interviewDue to which the stock price of Dateline increased.
“The switch flipped and the Trump administration has encouraged them to industrialize this national park site,” said Katrina Tomas, an attorney at Earthjustice, the public interest law firm that is handling the lawsuit. “This is a blatant threat to the Mojave Protected Area, setting a dangerous precedent that industrial mining interests can override decades-established park protections.”
Dateline has since conducted additional development, including grading the road leading to the mine and leveling more areas of land, according to the lawsuit, which asks the court to revoke the Park Service’s approval for the mine.
The company is now exploring for rare earth elements just outside Joshua Tree National Park.
