A tribal organization and several conservation groups have taken legal action to stop the Trump administration’s plans to allow oil drilling across the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Their amended filing, in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, renews the effort to stop the oil and gas leasing program approved by President Donald Trump’s Interior Department.
A lease sale, which allows bidding that could lead to oil exploration, must take place before July 4, according to federal law.
The administrations under Trump established the leasing program in 2020, and reinstated it in October.
The administration has proposed opening the entire coastal plain, or 1.6 million acres, to possible oil and gas leasing.
The groups suing include the Gwich’in Steering Committee, representing Indigenous communities in Alaska and Canada who hunt the Porcupine caribou herd that calves in the coastal plain. Other groups include the Alaska Wilderness League, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Sierra Club.
They are suing the Interior Department. The state of Alaska and the North Slope Borough are among the groups that have intervened in the case, siding with the Trump administration.
The lawsuit alleges that the leasing program violated several laws, including the Endangered Species Act.
The groups suing say the plan will worsen climate change and hurt polar bears and other wildlife. They pointed out that the Porcupine and Central Arctic caribou herds that use the coastal plain have declined sharply, based on a recent state report.
“It is unconscionable that this administration is advancing an Arctic Refuge leasing plan, which is opposed by the majority of Americans, would violate our rights as Alaska Native people, and blatantly contains multiple legal deficiencies,” said Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, in a prepared statement.
Congress in 2017 passed a law requiring the first-ever lease sales in the refuge, after decades of controversial efforts by Republicans to open the area to drilling. Trump signed the bill into law.
But the law provided minimal details for how the lease sales should take place.
The Trump and Biden administrations took sharply different approaches.
The conservation groups had paused their lawsuit against the Trump-era plan, after the Biden administration halted it to address legal concerns.
The Biden administration held the second lease sale as required by law in 2025, drawing zero bids from interested companies.
But that lease sale sharply limited the available acreage to the minimum allowed in the law of 400,000 acres.
Today just one entity, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, owns leases.
The state agency acquired those seven leases, totaling 365,000 acres, in the first lease sale held in the original Trump administration.
Randy Ruaro, the head of the agency, has previously said he’s hopeful seismic exploration to hunt for oil deposits on the leases can take place in the coming months.
The state agency has planned to work with private companies to capitalize on the leases and pursue the first commercial drilling in the refuge.
The amended lawsuit seeks to invalidate those leases.
Representatives with the Interior Department and the state agency could not be immediately reached for comment.
The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason.
Last year, Gleason had reinstated the seven leases held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, after the agency had sued the federal government. Gleason determined that the Biden administration didn’t have the legal authority to cancel them.
The decision involving the leases is a different legal matter, said Dawnell Smith with Trustees for Alaska, representing the Gwich’in and several other groups in the case.
“We’re seeking to vacate AIDEA’s lease because they were issued pursuant to an unlawful leasing program,” she said in an email Wednesday.
“In the litigation AIDEA brought challenging the separate decision to cancel its leases, the District Court ruled that the cancellation was improper from a procedural standpoint, but that didn’t relate to the underlying problems with the leasing program,” she said.
