OAK FLAT: Copper Mine will Guzzle Water and Dump Massive Toxic Waste

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Photo by Sandra Rambler, San Carlos Apache. Rest in Power.

OAK FLAT: Copper Mine will Guzzle Water and Dump Massive Toxic Waste

By Center for Biological Diversity, Censored News, August 25, 2026

After years of opposition from a diverse coalition — including Indigenous Tribes and the Center for Biological Diversity — the Trump administration finalized the transfer of 2,422 acres of public lands in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest to a foreign mining giant. These lands include Oak Flat, an Apache sacred site threatened by the company’s plan to build one of the biggest underground copper mines in North America.

To do that it needs to acquire 8,200 acres of Arizona state trust land, an area known as Skunk Camp, to build a facility where it can dump more than a billion tons of toxic mining waste.

Gov. Katie Hobbs and her administration have the authority to stop the land acquisition.

The State Land Department can decline to start or approve a sale or lease of state trust land. The department has already concluded that the Skunk Camp mine-waste facility would devalue surrounding trust land and harm trust revenues.

The proposed facility would span more than 14 square miles — an area larger than Winslow — with a nearly 3-mile-long, 500-foot-high dam designed to store approximately 1.4 billion tons of toxic mining waste. A dam failure would be catastrophic, flooding downstream communities and contaminating the Gila River watershed for hundreds of miles.

The broader planned copper mine would permanently destroy Oak Flat, harming Native American religious practices and traditional ways of life, and it’s expected to consume more than 250 billion gallons of groundwater over its lifetime.

Arizona families and Tribes shouldn’t bear this project’s environmental risks, water depletion, and long-term liabilities while foreign investors reap the profits.

Tell Gov. Hobbs to reject any proposal that would turn Arizona’s state trust lands into a dumping ground for foreign-owned mining operations.