Dear President Biden,

On behalf of our millions of members and supporters, we urge your Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) to deny the Lake Oahe easement, permanently shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and leave the piping in place in alignment with federal law.

The Dakota Access Pipeline violates the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, and Indigenous sovereignty.

From destroying sacred sites, putting drinking water at risk, increasing the problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) that comes with fossil fuel project construction, and exacerbating climate change, DAPL has already caused real harm and should be shut down. Impacted Tribes have still not been provided with complete and unredacted spill response plans, and in 2024, we learned that massive amounts of drilling fluid likely spilled during construction.

The incoming Trump Administration will do its best to expand fossil fuels and eliminate the world’s chances of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We urge you to cement your climate legacy by using these final months of your Administration to shut down this dangerous pipeline.

While the massive protests which drew thousands of people to Standing Rock in 2016 garnered the most attention, the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes have been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline consistently since 2015.

In 2017, the Obama Administration correctly recognized the Army Corps of Engineers’ obligation to evaluate DAPL in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before approval. Trump reversed course, ignoring the law, and quickly pushed the project through before the courts were able to confirm that an EIS was required.

In 2020, DAPL expanded capacity from 570,000 barrels/day (one of the biggest pipelines in North Dakota) to 1.1 million barrels per day (one of the biggest pipeline capacities in the whole country). That same year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Army Corps to complete a new environmental review of DAPL and vacated DAPL’s easement for the crossing of Lake Oahe, a part of the Missouri River. DAPL has been operating without that easement ever since.

Last year, in response to the ruling, the Army Corps issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the pipeline. Unfortunately, the DEIS was deficient in many ways, and the Army Corps refused to provide much of the data it used to the Tribes.

This year, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed an historic lawsuit against your Army Corps of Engineers to shut down the infamous pipeline for good.

We urge you to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline before you leave office. Specifically, to direct the Army Corps of Engineers to finalize its Environmental Impact Statement and choose no action alternative two.

The Obama-Biden Administration made the decision to listen to tribes and shut down Keystone XL. We hope you will make a similar decision now and shut down DAPL.

Thank you for your consideration.