TUCSON— Two years after a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Forest Service this week released the appraisals for the proposed Oak Flat land exchange and mine project in Arizona.

As expected, the appraisals show that if a planned land exchange moves forward Resolution Copper would receive billions more than the value of the land it’s offering. Oak Flat, the epicenter of the proposed Resolution Copper mine east of Phoenix, is a sacred Indigenous site, popular campground and world-renowned recreation area.

“We’ve long known the public would be screwed over by this terrible land swap, and now we’ve got the receipts,” said Marc Fink, a senior attorney at the Center. “Handing Oak Flat over to Resolution Copper would be a catastrophe for the Tribes in the region and an environmental disaster for Arizona. The appraisal shows it’d also be a multibillion-dollar gift to this international mining company. The land swap is a horrible deal for the American people and it should be scrapped.”

Resolution claims the mine will produce up to 40 billion pounds of copper over 40 years from beneath Oak Flat and the adjacent federal lands that would be provided to the mining company. At today’s market prices, this copper would be worth more than $150 billion.

According to the appraisals, released Tuesday, Resolution would transfer its current lands worth $9.8 million in exchange for more than 2,000 acres of federal public lands containing billions of dollars’ worth of copper. The federal government would receive no royalties on this copper, which would likely be shipped to southeast Asia for smelting, according to the documents.

In 2023 the Center sued the Forest Service when it ignored a request for the appraisals under the Freedom of Information Act. Following that lawsuit the Forest Service provided a heavily redacted version of the appraisal summary instead of the full appraisal. In March, after two years of litigation, a federal court ordered the Forest Service to release the full appraisal.

The appraisal’s release comes one week after the Trump administration announced plans to move ahead with the land exchange by publishing the proposal’s final environmental analysis within 60 days. Former President Biden had paused the exchange.

There are three separate lawsuits challenging the proposed land exchange: the first filed by Apache Stronghold, the second by the San Carlos Apache Tribe, and the third by a coalition of conservation organizations and the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona. Apache Stronghold has a petition for review currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Resolution should be required to pay what this site is actually worth, as the law requires,” said Fink. “Instead Trump is essentially giving billions of dollars of copper to an international mining company, to be shipped overseas, for practically nothing. And he calls himself a businessman? No wonder the Forest Service was trying to hide this appraisal.”

The land exchange’s purpose is to facilitate construction of a massive copper mine at Oak Flat. The mine would destroy a sacred site of tremendous spiritual importance to the San Carlos Apache Tribe and other Tribes in the region.

The lands of Oak Flat are also home to endangered and threatened species like ocelots and Arizona hedgehog cacti.

Multinational mining conglomerate Rio Tinto intends to carve a massive copper mine into Oak Flat’s rolling hills. The mine would use a new technique to excavate the ore body 7,000 feet underground. Material removed from the mine would spread toxic waste across thousands of acres of public land and the mine would leave behind a crater up to two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep.