Federal Government to Pay North Dakota $27.8 Million for DAPL Protest Costs

The federal government will pay North Dakota nearly $28 million to settle a lawsuit over the costs of policing massive protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline nearly a decade ago, the state's attorney general announced Thursday. The final settlement amount of $27.8 million matches a federal court judgment from 2025, according to the Associated Press.

Republican Attorney General Drew Wrigley announced the settlement, stating North Dakota is now "made financially whole." The funds will finalize debts from loans taken from the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Wrigley said the U.S. Department of Justice also agreed to dismiss all its appeals and issue a formal statement acknowledging the impacts of the protests on the state. "We deeply appreciate those acknowledgments. They're a long time coming," Wrigley told reporters, as reported by the AP.

In a statement, the U.S. Justice Department said it disputes the court's legal analysis but "acknowledges in hindsight that, under the Obama Administration, the federal government could have done more to reduce the impacts to the people of North Dakota" from the protests. The department cited "unlawfulness and confrontational violence" at times and said the federal government chose not to forcibly remove protestors from federal property to avoid further escalation, a choice it recognized had "painful consequences for North Dakota and many of its residents," according to the AP and North Dakota Monitor.

The lawsuit, filed in 2019, alleged the federal government caused the protests to grow by unlawfully allowing demonstrators to camp on federal land managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers near the pipeline's Missouri River crossing. In 2025, U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor found the federal government liable on all claims, including negligence and public nuisance, the AP reported.

Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong welcomed the settlement as "long overdue." In a statement carried by NewsDakota.com, Armstrong said, "The Obama administration not only enabled but in fact encouraged these unlawful protests by failing to evict protestors from Army Corps of Engineers’ land – instead playing politics with a legally permitted pipeline that has now been operating for almost a decade without incident." He added the settlement removes the financial burden from North Dakota taxpayers.

The protests, which took place over months in 2016 and 2017, involved thousands of people opposing the pipeline's construction. According to trial testimony cited by NewsDakota.com, North Dakota's emergency response lasted over 230 days, involved 178 response agencies, and resulted in 761 arrests, 709 of which were out-of-state residents. Cleanup of protest camps required over 600 dumpsters for 9.8 million pounds of garbage and hazardous materials.

For Bakken operators, the settlement represents the final resolution of a major, state-incurred cost related to the infrastructure critical for moving the region's crude oil to market. The Dakota Access Pipeline has been operational for years, transporting oil from the Bakken formation.