Feds to Pay North Dakota $28M for DAPL Protest Policing Costs

The federal government will pay North Dakota nearly $28 million to settle a lawsuit over the state's costs for policing massive protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline nearly a decade ago, state officials announced Thursday. The settlement finalizes a judgment from last year and brings a close to a nearly seven-year legal battle, according to Attorney General Drew Wrigley.

The final settlement sum of roughly $27.8 million matches the amount U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor determined the federal government owed the state after a 2025 trial. As part of the agreement, the U.S. Department of Justice dismissed its appeals and issued a statement acknowledging the impacts of the protests, Wrigley said at a press conference. "We deeply appreciate those acknowledgments. They’re a long time coming," he stated.

In its statement, the Justice Department disputed the court's legal analysis but acknowledged that "under the Obama Administration, the federal government could have done more to reduce the impacts to the people of North Dakota." The agency said federal officials at the time chose not to forcibly remove protesters from federal land to avoid further escalation, a choice it recognized had "painful consequences for North Dakota and many of its residents."

Governor Kelly Armstrong called the settlement "long overdue" in a separate statement. "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," Armstrong said. He thanked the legal team for reaching a settlement "that removes the financial burden from North Dakota taxpayers and places it on the shoulders of the federal government where it belongs."

The lawsuit, filed in 2019, alleged that the federal government caused the protests to grow by unlawfully allowing demonstrators to camp on federal land near the pipeline's Missouri River crossing for months in 2016 and 2017. Wrigley said the settlement money will finalize debts from loans taken from the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, making the state "financially whole."

The protests represented a massive and costly law enforcement operation for the state. According to trial testimony cited by Governor Armstrong, North Dakota's emergency response lasted over 230 days, involved 178 response agencies across four counties, and resulted in 761 arrests. The cleanup of protest camps required over 600 dumpsters to remove 9.8 million pounds of garbage and hazardous materials.

For Bakken operators and the state's oil industry, the settlement resolves a significant financial claim stemming from the period of intense opposition to Dakota Access, a critical pipeline that moves Bakken crude to market. The pipeline has been operational since 2017.