Threatening the Boundary Waters Creates Opening for Democrats

Minnesota's Boundary Waters face a threat. And it involves a Chilean billionaire who was once Ivanka Trump's landlord.

Ely, Minnesota, Credit: Josh Hild,

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness sprawls across 1.1 million acres in northeastern Minnesota. Dense forests teem with wildlife. It's the last large protected forest of its kind in the lower 48 states. Every year, about 150,000 visitors paddle through its waters. They pump $13.5 billion into Minnesota's economy.

But corruption wants to change that.

Meet the billionaire landlord

Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic runs Antofagasta PLC, the world's ninth-largest copper mining company. His subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, wants to dig a copper-nickel mine near the headwaters of the Boundary Waters. The project could be worth billions.

A critical piece of information is that Luksic was the Kushners’ landlord during the first term of Donald Trump's presidency.

In December 2016, shortly after Trump won the election, a company controlled by Luksic purchased a $5.5 million mansion in Washington, D.C. Twelve days later, it was rented to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. According to reports, the Kushners rented the house at market value.

Luksic’s project has a history

President Barack Obama's administration had denied Twin Metals' mining leases. They said the area was too sensitive for mining.

President Donald Trump quickly reversed Obama's decision and renewed the leases. They even stopped an environmental review. This reversal would have granted Twin Metals 20-year leases with the right to perpetual renewals. Trump's reversal also forbids regular citizens from challenging these leases in court. Only Twin Metals could sue if the government didn't follow through.

Conservationist Becky Rom called it "a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company." Upon taking office, President Joe Biden's team stepped in and canceled the leases again. They called them "legally deficient" and banned mining in that part of the Superior National Forest for 20 years.

Luksic did not give up.

In 2025, Bruce Westerman's House Natural Resources Committee and fellow Rep Pete Stauber (R-MN) inserted a provision in Trump's "Big, Beautiful" budget reconciliation bill. It would have reversed the ban, restored Twin Metals’ leases and once again blocked citizens from suing to stop it.

The Senate dropped this from the bill because it violates a parliamentary technicality, the Byrd rule for reconciliation bills. Senator Tina Smith celebrated the removal, but the amount of money that Luksic and his companies have spent on lobbyists indicates he will not stop.

Lobbying, the legal corruption

In recent years, Luksic and his firms have spent more than $1.6 million on lobbying.

His primary firm appears to be Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck, where former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt works. Bernhardt was Trump's former Secretary of the Interior, who initially overturned Obama's protections. Luksic also hired the lobbying company of former Senator Tom Daschle at one point.

Antofagasta’s environmental record

Luksic’s company, Antofagasta, has a poor environmental record in Chile. It has polluted groundwater, destroyed cultural sites and faced massive fines for ecological issues.

Its Minnesota project risks causing "serious and irreplaceable harm" to the Boundary Waters from acid mine drainage, a highly acidic form of water pollution common to sulfide-ore mining. It would not only damage a pristine American wilderness area but also further harm our relationship with Canada, as the Boundary Waters is a shared ecosystem.

Canada has options

The United States and Canada are party to one of the most amicable treaties in the world, the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. So congenial is this century-old treaty that when the US merely hinted that it might lodge a unilateral request for a study of potential water pollution from Elk-Kootenay coal mining, it resulted in satisfactory resolution for both parties.

The treaty governing shared bodies of water says neither the U.S. nor Canada can alter waters that cross the border "to the injury of health or property on the other." And while the unilateral action of one country would mean that the International Joint Commission (IJC) could only investigate and make non-binding recommendations, if requested by both the Canadian Foreign Minister and the US Secretary of State, the IJC may launch an unbiased process of review that leads to “orders of approval” that are binding. It opens the process to extensive review, public consultation, and technical analysis. Democrats, border state Republicans and the Canadians have very good reasons to push Rubio to do so, as the treaty is vital to the United States and border regions.

The treaty is one of the foundations that reassured both countries to maintain the US-Canadian border as the longest demilitarized border in the world. Undermining this treaty would erode the fiscal freedom it affords the US. It would reduce the certainty of arable farmland, ample drinking water, among many other indirect impacts.

Clean water, fiscal sanity, stock trading, oh my

Democrats have used the Luksic affair to point to the fact that a foreign billionaire could buy access to change US policy without having to register with FARA. However, Luksic’s lobbying touches on far more salient political issues – three political hot buttons: corruption, clean water, and fiscal impacts.

• A 2019 poll found that corruption was a higher concern for voters than gun violence or leadership.

• Americans have traditionally had powerful feelings about clean water. An April poll placed it just behind inflation as a top issue. When the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, Congress had such strong support for it that it overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto.

• Fiscal sanity remains a wedge issue for parts of the MAGA coalition. Due to the scale of guarding the Canadian border, it would be a significantly larger task, costing orders of magnitude more than Trump’s deployment to the US-Mexico border. And that does not take into account the cost of increasing the size of the military, farmers having to worry about less secure water rights, lost trade and revenue, and the growing size of the US government.

This issue combines the tangible impacts of corruption with real threats to some of America’s most cherished priorities. And it would force Republicans to grapple with a potential fissure in their coalition. Not to mention, Westerman appears to have traded stocks based on this corruption.

At Dekleptocracy, we have a mission at the forefront of the pro-democracy coalition's agenda. And while the saga would appear to be just a look at how political influence works in Washington, it’s much more than that: It’s an easy first step for the effective use of anti-corruption as a political tool against Trump.

It puts some of Trump’s enablers in the spotlight and forces Trump to decide whether to expend political capital on their defense. Draining the swamp starts in places like Minnesota.