A federal judge on Tuesday denied an Indian tribe’s claim that approving the Dakota Access oil pipeline violated its right to religious practice.
The Cheyenne River Sioux tribe had tried to use the religious rights argument to roll back the Trump administration’s approval of the controversial pipeline project that would take the pipeline under Lake Oahe in North Dakota.
D.C. District Court Judge James Boasberg said the argument does not pass muster, citing Supreme Court precedent. The Cheyenne claim “involves a government action … that has an incidental, if serious, impact on a tribe’s ability to practice its religion because of spiritual desecration of a sacred site,” the judge wrote in his decision.
Similar claims were brought before the Supreme Court over federal tree cutting, which “did not give rise to an actionable free exercise claim,” Boasberg added. Neither does the Army Corps of Engineers’ easement-granting for the Dakota Access pipeline violate the law, the decision read.
A consortium representing the pipeline’s developers said in court filings that it expects to begin moving oil through Dakota Access as soon as March 13, according to Bloomberg.
Attorneys for the tribe did not say anything about next steps in light of court decision, except to say that they were disappointed with the decision.
The $3.8 billion, nearly 1,200-mile long Dakota Access pipeline will deliver oil from North Dakota’s shale oil fields to markets eastward via Chicago. The pipeline was halted over a 1.5-mile-long easement under Lake Oahe after the Obama administration stopped the project in the wake of intense protests and heated confrontations with police to block the project. President Trump ordered that the project’s approval be expedited last month in an executive memorandum, along with a separate order on the Keystone XL oil pipeline connecting Canada’s oil sands to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico.
