The National Park Service broke the law when it greenlit a mining operations in the Mojave National Preserve amid a long-running dispute with agency officials that took an abrupt turn when President Trump took office, alleges a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the National Parks Conservation Assn.
“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.
The conservation group has taken issue with the Colosseum Mine, where workers drilled for gold and silver until the 1990s. The open pit is located in the Clark Mountains, which provide habitat for bighorn sheep and are estimated to harbor the second-highest density of rare plants of any of the state’s mountain ranges.
Australia’s Dateline Resources Ltd. acquired the mine in 2021, telling shareholders that it would focus primarily on gold mining but also explore for 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 Parks Conservation Assn. and shared with The Times last year.
In 2022, the Park Service notified company officials that the mine was operating without authorization and demanded that it cease work until it submitted an operations plan and won the agency’s approval, those documents state. This would typically give the Park Service the opportunity to analyze the environmental effects of the proposed work and add terms and conditions to conserve park resources.
In response, company representatives contended the Park Service had no basis to require permits or a new plan of operations because the activities were already authorized under existing approvals issued by the Bureau of Land Management in 1985, the correspondence states. The BLM managed the land before the Mojave National Preserve was established in 1994.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, claims that after President Trump took office, the Park Service abruptly reversed course and gave the mine the go-ahead without a valid plan of operations or the necessary permits and approvals.
In addition to the Park Service and Interior Department, the Conservation Assn.’s suit names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Acting Park Service Director Jessica Bowron and Acting Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Kevin Schluckebier.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the litigation. The Park Service and Dateline Resources did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
The Park Service also sought to recover $213,387 in costs and damages stemming from two incidents in which Dateline and its contractors allegedly performed unpermitted roadwork, razing sensitive land and destroying hundreds of plants, according to the correspondence obtained by The Times last year.
But after years of back and forth with Dateline, the Park Service last April — shortly after Trump took office — informed the company that it no longer had to seek agency authorization to keep mining, according to the lawsuit. Mojave National Preserve officials also rescinded the demand that the company pay damages stemming from the roadwork, the suit states.
Trump touted the project on Truth Social last May, and Burgum endorsed it in a Fox News interview, sending Dateline’s stock value soaring.
“The switch flipped and the Trump administration has encouraged them to charge ahead with industrializing this national park site,” said Katrina Tomas, attorney for Earthjustice, the public interest law firm that is handling the lawsuit. “This is a blatant threat to the Mojave Preserve, setting a dangerous precedent that industrial mining interests can override decades of established park protections.”
Dateline has since performed additional development, including grading the access road leading to the mine and leveling more areas of land, according to the lawsuit, which asks the court to set aside the Park Service’s approval of the mine.
The company is now exploring for rare earth elements just outside Joshua Tree National Park.
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