Walz Blocks Mining Near Boundary Waters Days After Trump Signed Law Reopening It

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed Executive Order 26-10 on Tuesday, directing state agencies to stop issuing mining permits and leases in the Rainy River Headwaters Watershed near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The order also triggers a state review of 38 existing mineral leases in the area, including one held by Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining company Antofagasta, according to Breitbart News.

The move directly reverses course from Washington. In April, President Donald Trump signed legislation, sponsored by Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) and passed by a 50-49 Senate vote, that repealed a 20-year federal ban on new mining leases near the Boundary Waters. That ban had been put in place during the Biden administration. Walz's order effectively tries to reinstate a version of that ban using state authority instead.

"As far as my administration is concerned, the fight for the future of the Boundary Waters is over," Walz said, according to Breitbart News.

Republicans Call It Retaliation

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the highest-ranking Minnesotan in Congress, did not hold back. He told Fox News Digital the order was "stupid" and "dangerous," and said it would "harm Minnesota (and) good union jobs in northern Minnesota" while putting "our national defense more at risk with our enemies, adversaries like Communist China."

On Breitbart News Saturday, Emmer went further, calling Walz a "lame duck loser" who is "complicit in the fraud in this state" and now acting out of spite on his way out the door. Walz dropped his 2026 reelection bid amid a sprawling state social-services fraud scandal, according to Breitbart News.

Emmer's core argument is a supply-chain one. Northeastern Minnesota's Duluth Complex holds the largest known untapped deposit of nickel and copper in North America, plus palladium, according to Fox News. Those minerals go into electric vehicle components, military equipment, cell phones, and commercial electronics. Emmer argues that if the U.S. doesn't mine it here, under strict American environmental rules, that production simply shifts to countries like China and Russia, where environmental oversight is far weaker. Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), who sponsored the federal repeal, called Walz's order "an outright war on Northern Minnesota and our way of life," per Breitbart News.

Environmental Groups Say the Federal Repeal Was the Real Overreach

Save The Boundary Waters Executive Director Ingrid Lyons offered the opposing case, and it deserves to be stated on its own terms. Lyons said the federal government "sold out our canoe country earlier this year by stripping away protections that took hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans' voices and years of work to secure, all while ignoring science and the will of the public," according to Fox News. She praised Walz for "pulling out all of the stops to keep toxic copper mining out of the headwaters of the Boundary Waters" and called on the state legislature to pass permanent protections.

Mining is already banned inside the Boundary Waters wilderness itself. The dispute is over the buffer zone outside it. Environmental groups argue, per MPR News as cited by Fox News, that mining in that outer zone still risks contaminating the watershed that feeds into the protected area, since water flows downstream regardless of where a permitting line is drawn on a map. Copper-nickel, or sulfide, mining carries a documented risk of acid mine drainage if not managed carefully, which is the scientific basis for the concern, though no source here presents an independent environmental impact assessment of the current Twin Metals leases.

What's Actually in Dispute

Emmer's claim that the order is about spite rather than substance is his own characterization, not an established fact. Walz's stated rationale is protecting a wilderness watershed. Both motives can be partially true, and neither is provable from these sources alone.

On the economic numbers, Breitbart News reports the order would kill "hundreds if not thousands" of union jobs and cut revenue flowing to Minnesota's public school trust lands, an Emmer claim not independently verified by a state jobs estimate in the available reporting. The deposit's scale, the largest untapped nickel-copper source in North America, is corroborated across Fox News, Yahoo News, and other outlets, but that describes potential development, not confirmed employment figures tied specifically to this order.

AP News covered the story but the retrievable version of that report was a stripped navigation page rather than substantive text, so its specific framing could not be independently assessed here.

The practical fight now shifts to two places: the 38 leases under state review, including Twin Metals', and the Minnesota legislature, which Lyons wants to pass permanent statutory protections before a future governor could reverse Walz's order the same way Trump's legislation reversed the prior federal ban. Given Walz is not seeking reelection, whether that legislative push succeeds, or whether his successor simply undoes the executive order next year, remains unresolved.