The Budget Bill Was a Boon for This Chilean Billionaire

This article was originally published by the Lever, an investigative newsroom. If you like this story, sign up for the Lever’s free newsletter.

A last-minute provision inserted into President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill would allow Chile’s wealthiest business magnate — and former landlord to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump — to begin mining operations on protected federal lands. Mining at the proposed Minnesota site poses irreversible environmental risks to nearby bodies of fresh water, according to a federal environmental review. 

The mining company that stands to benefit, Antofagasta, is owned by the Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, whose family-run conglomerate, the Luksic Group, is the largest business empire in Chile. The parent company operates everything from food processing businesses and banking companies to energy and mining operations. 

From 2017 to 2021, Luksic rented a $5.5 million mansion he owned in Washington, D.C., to Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, the latter of whom was serving as a senior adviser to Trump at the time. While he was renting to the Trump family, Luksic was also suing the U.S. government to move forward with the Minnesota mining leases. A year after Luksic’s new tenants moved in, the Trump administration approved the leases — which were subsequently held up in court. 

Lifting restrictions on the proposed development, known as Twin Metals, is earmarked in the budget reconciliation package passed by the House and now headed to the Senate. The project would involve a nearly $2 billion nickel and copper mining operation on federal land in northeastern Minnesota.

In hopes of approving the mine, Antofagasta retained the lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, where Trump’s former secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt, now works. In 2019, while he headed the department, Bernhardt rubber-stamped Antofagasta’s mining leases for Twin Metals, despite serious environmental concerns from local stakeholders. 

An earlier version of the reconciliation bill contained a massive sell-off of nearly 500,000 acres of public lands to private developers. The language was stripped from the final version, in part due to objections from conservation-minded Republicans. What remains is a handful of approvals for long-sought-after mining projects on federal lands in Minnesota and Alaska, including Antofagasta’s Twin Metals operation. 

Digging deeper

Since 2012, Luksic has worked to secure leases from the U.S. government for exclusive mining rights to the nickel- and copper-rich land next to Superior National Forest, a national park adjacent to two major bodies of water, the U.S. Forest Service’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Lake Superior. 

But the Twin Metals site has hit a number of roadblocks. Native American tribes in the area and conservation groups objected to the project from its outset, claiming the operation’s toxic chemical runoffs could potentially impact nearby water sources and ecosystems. 

In 2016, the Obama administration blocked the project, agreeing that the planned mine would cause serious ecological damage to the surrounding area. But shortly after taking office, the Trump administration reversed that decision. Instead, the Trump administration issued preliminary permits to Antofagasta for Twin Metals — but the project then faced a lawsuit from three environmental groups seeking to block the project under the National Environmental Policy Act, a federal law that forces the government to comply with basic environmental standards when contracting federal lands.

Meanwhile, an investigation at the time by multiple outlets uncovered that Luksic had bought a D.C. mansion shortly after Trump’s 2016 election victory, at the same time he was suing the federal government over the Obama-era ban on Twin Metals. Shortly after his purchase, Luksic began renting the property to Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Litigation over the mining permits continued until the Biden administration sided with critics of the project. After an extensive environmental assessment, Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, issued a 20-year ban on any mining leases for private development near the Superior Forest and Boundary Waters, citing both detrimental ecological and economic impacts.

“Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” said Haaland. 

The provision in the current bill lifts the Biden-era ban. Antofagasta spent $200,000 on lobbying in the final quarter of last year, as the tax bill began taking shape, and $230,000 this quarter on issues including federal leases for Twin Metals. In 2022, as the Biden administration conducted an environmental review of Twin Metals, Antofagasta spent more than $1 million lobbying the federal government. 

The right-wing group Americans for Prosperity, an affiliate of the powerful political network helmed by tycoon Charles Koch, whose empire includes extensive mining operations, also lobbied on the Twin Metals mine. 

Americans for Prosperity slipped another provision into the tax bill to expedite approval for a mining operation in Alaska. Ambler Metals, a joint venture of two foreign mining companies, has been held up in courts for years and was blocked by the Biden administration after an environmental review. The new budget bill undoes that ban, clearing the way for the construction of a road that runs through federal lands to serve the Ambler Metals mining site.