Trump Admin Appears To Be Going Full Steam Ahead In Defying UN With Oil Drilling Site

The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to extract oil and gas near United Nations-designated historic sites, despite pleas from the international organization.

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) told the Guardian that it had learned the administration intended to permit extraction within a drilling-free buffer zone that had previously been put in place to protect New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. (RELATED: Hunters Cry Fowl Over Trump Review They Fear Could Hammer Duck Populations Nationwide)

“The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” UNESCO told the Guardian, adding that the UN agency is considering the implications of procedures established to protect world heritage property from “potential threats,” pending a response from the administration.

UNESCO also said that drilling at the site could have adverse effects, and that appropriate assessments are taken before any decisions are made around the site to ensure that it does not “adversely affect [the site’s] outstanding universal value.”

The park, a world heritage site, holds the remains of the Ancestral Puebloans, who constructed the dwellings more than a millennium ago, and is currently viewed as a valuable cultural and religious site by more than two dozen tribes.

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In 2023, Biden’s Department of the Interior created a mining buffer zone around nearly 336,400 acres of federal public land surrounding the park, protecting federal land within approximately 10 miles of the park from new mining leases and claims for 20 years, the Museum of Indigenous People said.

UNESCO is not alone in protesting the decision. New Mexico’s Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján have also called out the administration, with Grisham saying that the department’s 14 days of public input was not enough for “a decision this consequential.”

“This land is sacred to 20 Pueblo Nations,” the governor said. “It is not a bargaining chip for oil and gas leases.”

The Department of the Interior did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

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