Park Service broke the law approving mining inside Mojave National Preserve, lawsuit says

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The National Park Service broke the law when it greenlit a mining operation 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.World & Nation Two golfers in Washington have sued the federal government to try to prevent the Trump administration from overhauling a more than 100-year-old public golf course, which they say violates a law governing the property and environmental law.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 environ...