The Boundary Waters Litigation is on Hold, Again.

I’ve been traveling for the past week or so, and haven’t had a chance until this morning to publish these latest filings in Twin Metals v. US. (For background, see this, this, this, and this, among many other posts.)

As those who have been following the case are aware, in March of 2025, just a month after he was sworn in, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum did an about-face and joined the plaintiffs (a foreign mining company with plans to mine nickel and copper and on the edge of the Boundary Waters). At the time, the parties requested that this case be put on hold, or held in abeyance. A group of small businesses and non-profits involved in the case as Defendant-Intervenors that I have been calling the Civil Society group did not join the government in that request.

The motion for abeyance granted (back in July), Burgum and the mining company’s lawyers and lobbyists then had 90 days to find a way around the provisions and protections put in place by the Biden administration. Those 90 days have nearly come and gone. So on October 1 they requested and on October 7 the court granted another 180 days.

90 days was not enough time to do all they had to do. Pete Stauber failed to smuggle a Boundary Waters blowout sale into the budget bill, but Interior managed to revoke the legal opinion that recognized the federal government’s authority to say “no” to the mining company. (That legal work had mostly already been done by solicitor Daniel Jorjani in the first year of the first Trump administration.)

Now Doug Burgum and the mining company lawyers and lobbyists need to find a way to revive the Chilean conglomerate’s cancelled leases and do something about the preference right lease applications that the previous administration denied. That will ultimately require doing something about the 20-year Rainy River watershed mineral withdrawal, which Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claims a “review” determined to be unnecessary.

The federal government is currently shut down and the case in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is now on hold until April, 2026. For the sake of good housekeeping, here are the court documents.

1 October 2025 Joint Status ReportDownload 7 October 2025 180 day abeyanceDownload

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