Trump Push for Pacific Seabed Mining Runs Into Guam, Northern Marianas Opposition

The Trump administration wants to lease out huge chunks of the Pacific seafloor for mineral exploration, and the U.S. territories sitting closest to the action are pushing back hard.

On Tuesday, the Marine Mineral Administration, an agency inside the Department of the Interior, released a proposal to auction deep-sea mining leases covering 28 million hectares, about 69 million acres, of seafloor off Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, according to the Guardian. The target is polymetallic nodules: potato-sized clumps of manganese, cobalt, nickel and other metals used in batteries, electronics and defense hardware.

This follows a separate leasing process already underway for 12.4 million hectares of seafloor near American Samoa, with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management planning to award contracts as soon as November, according to AFP reporting carried by both Phys.org and pina.com.fj.

Northern Marianas Lieutenant Governor David Apatang says his government will treat the new proposal "with extreme caution." He told AFP no one consulted his people before Washington announced in March that a second block of ocean west of Saipan, similar in size to the one already proposed east of the capital, could also be leased. Apatang says his administration needs 60 days to examine the terms and wants "rigorous scientific baseline studies, complete transparency, and explicit protections" before any survey work begins.

Guam's government is more blunt. Lieutenant Governor Joshua Tenorio told the Guardian his territory is "unequivocally opposed" to deep-sea mining in the region. He says Interior's assurances that leasing won't immediately mean mining aren't good enough: "I think that this is a matter where we can't really trust that because this has been rapidly evolving." Guam has already passed laws banning deep-sea mining vessels from using its ports, a move that could cut off fuel and supply access the industry needs to operate.

Food security is the core concern. Lieutenant Governor Apatang told AFP that Northern Marianas residents depend on ocean resources for survival, and disruption to fisheries and marine ecosystems isn't an abstract environmental worry there. It's a livelihood issue.

The legal reality, though, is that these territories have limited leverage. As AFP notes, U.S. territories rely on Washington for funding and defense, and they have little formal say over what the federal government does with ocean territory beyond their three-mile maritime boundary. The leasing falls under the Outer Continental Shelf framework, not the International Seabed Authority, which only governs international waters outside any nation's jurisdiction, according to Earthjustice. This isn't the same fight playing out at the ISA's Kingston, Jamaica meetings over international seabed rules. It's U.S. domestic authority over U.S. territorial waters, which is exactly why local governments feel like they're being overruled rather than negotiated with.

Trump's broader case is that America can't stay dependent on China for critical minerals. On August 7, Trump announced nearly $3 billion in mining and battery investments, including a $1.4 billion Department of War loan to Sila Nanotechnologies for a Washington state battery plant and a $150 million investment in Niron Magnetics, a Minnesota magnet manufacturer, according to the Epoch Times. "We're putting our miners back to work, and we're reclaiming America's rightful place as the minerals superpower of the world," Trump said at the event, which drew Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

That same tension is playing out on land in Minnesota. Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order Tuesday halting mining permits near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, reversing ground Trump had already cleared in April when he signed legislation repealing a 20-year Biden-era mining ban near the same land, according to Fox News. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told Breitbart the move would "empower our adversaries like the Communist Party of China" and kill union jobs tied to the Duluth Complex, one of the largest untapped nickel and copper deposits in North America. Walz, who dropped his 2026 reelection bid amid a state fraud scandal, said simply: "the fight for the future of the Boundary Waters is over." Environmental groups like Save the Boundary Waters argue mining outside the wilderness buffer still threatens the protected area inside it.

Both fights center on the same underlying question: does the mineral supply chain race with China justify moving fast on projects local communities and conservationists say haven't been adequately studied. No mining has actually started in the Pacific leases under review, and the Northern Marianas comment period runs another 60 days. Guam's port ban and the Marianas' threat to follow suit could become the real test of whether territorial op