Representatives of the Western Apache tribe filed an emergency appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent foreign mining company Resolution Copper from destroying the tribe’s sacred land at Oak Flat in Arizona. The copper mining company will take control of the territory in less than two weeks if the court does not intervene.

Oak Flat is central to the Apache religion. The site is often used for prayer and traditional ceremonies. The US government has recognized the Apaches’ right to this land since 1955. But in 2014, after several bills ceding the territory to Resolution Copper failed in Congress, the land transfer was added to a 1000-page must-pass defense budget bill in a “midnight backroom deal.”

The law allowed the mining company to gain control of the territory once the environmental impact statement (EIS) was complete. When the EIS was finalized, the Apaches only had 60 days to transfer the land. The Forest Service initially estimated that the report would be released in the summer of 2021, but the Trump administration accelerated the timeline.

The EIS was released on January 15, forcing the Apaches to give their land over by March 16. It concluded that the mine would cause “immediate, permanent, and large[-]scale” destruction of “archaeological sites, tribal sacred sites, [and] cultural landscapes.”

The tribe claims that the land transfer violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which provides that the “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.” The district court rejected the Apaches’ injunction request, claiming that the destruction of their holy land was not a substantial burden on their exercise of religious freedom.

Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Law, which is representing the Apaches, said following the motion’s filing on Tuesday, “Rio Tinto, the majority owner of Resolution Copper, has a track record of destroying Native [people’s] religious sites.” He cited a recent case involving the company’s destruction of a nearly 46,000-year-old cave system in Australia, a site that was sacred to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people and the Pinikura people.

If the mining company were permitted to take over the site, most of Oak Flat would become “a nearly two-mile-wide, 1,100-foot-deep crater.”