U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, delivers floor speech on congressional Republicans’ efforts to open up mining on Boundary Waters, April 15, 2026.
U.S. SENATE News:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The evening of April 15, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, delivered remarks on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to oppose a measure that would allow copper-nickel sulfide mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), which would be devastating to this wilderness area.
Using the Congressional Review Act to overturn a mineral withdrawal has never been done before. The proposed mine is owned by a Chilean mining conglomerate, Antofagasta, which has smelting contracts with Chinese companies to process the copper and zinc. After smelting, the metals will be sold to the highest bidder on international markets, or the Chinese government will use them to build out their own military and electrical infrastructure.
“Last July, I was supposed to be at the Boundary Waters. I had long-planned a trip with my family. It was to be our first time exploring the Boundary Waters. My family made it. I did not. My wife Julie and my sons Micah and Carter had an incredible time that they will always remember. They paddled their canoes across lakes. They portaged from lake to lake. They slept under a blanket of stars that most people in Washington D.C. could never imagine because they can’t see it, and I was supposed to be part of that trip. Instead, I was stuck here fighting to strip out the public land sell off language from the Republican budget bill.” Heinrich said.
Heinrich continued, “It is an absolute tapestry of lakes and streams consisting of well over 1,000 individual lakes; 2,000 designated campsites; hundreds of miles of rivers and streams. The Boundary Waters contain the largest contiguous landscape of uncut forest remaining in the eastern United States. And the 3-million-acre Superior National Forest, in which the Boundary Waters sits, contains fully 20 percent of all the fresh water in the entire National Forest System—an incredible figure.”
“But instead of listening to Minnesotans and Americans from all over the country who care about this place, Republicans today are using an unprecedented blunt-force legislative method that includes zero public comment period to make decisions about our public lands without any input from the people to whom those actually lands belong,” Heinrich said.
“The way I look at public lands is that they are the closest, most tangible thing we have to being able to represent true Jeffersonian democracy. They are the thing—like we saw last June—that unite us across the political spectrum. And if you take these public lands away, you also tear away the places where we are most free,” Heinrich concluded.
A video of Heinrich’s floor speech can be found here. The video can be watched here.