The Donald Trump administration has formally agreed to drop a landmark environmental justice case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” region, marking a blow to clean air advocates in the region and a win for the Japanese petrochemical giant at the centre of the litigation.
Legal filings made public on Friday morning reveal that Trump’s Department of Justice agreed to dismiss a long-running lawsuit against the operators of a synthetic rubber plant in Reserve, Louisiana, which is allegedly largely responsible for some of the highest cancer risk rates in the US for the surrounding majority-Black neighborhoods.
The litigation was filed under the Biden administration in February 2023 in a bid to substantially curb the plant’s emissions of a pollutant named chloroprene, a likely human carcinogen. It had targeted both the current operator, the Japanese firm Denka, and its previous owner, the American chemical giant DuPont, and formed a central piece of the former administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts to address environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. A trial had been due to start in April 2025 following lengthy delays.
Community leaders in Reserve had expressed grave concerns about the case’s future following Trump’s return to the White House after the president moved to gut offices within the EPA and justice department responsible for civil rights and environmental justice.
On Friday, 84-year-old Robert Taylor, a resident in Reserve who has lost a number of family members to cancer, described the move as “terrible” for his community.
“It’s obvious that the Trump administration doesn’t care anything for the poor Black folk in Cancer Alley,” Taylor said. “[Trump’s] administration has taken away what protections we had, what little hope we had.”
Filings show that parties involved in the litigation, including lawyers for Denka and DuPont, met on Wednesday and agreed jointly with the US justice department to dismiss the case.
In a statement released on Friday evening, the justice department said the dismissal was made in compliance with an executive order issued by Trump targeting “wasteful government” and “DEI programs” aimed to “eliminate ideological overreach and restore impartial enforcement of federal laws”.
The department claimed Biden’s EPA had overreached by utilizing the Clean Air Act’s emergency powers authority and had not alleged the plant had violated “any regulatory air quality standard”.
“We do not regulate through litigation, nor do we stretch statutes beyond their plain meaning to advance political agendas,” said Adam Gustafson, acting assistant attorney general.
The EPA’s longterm exposure limit for chloroprene is 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter. Air monitoring around the plant has frequently shown readings dozens over times above this threshold.
A spokesperson for Denka did not respond to questions from the Guardian but issued a statement thanking the Trump administration and lauding Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, for his “unwavering support”.
The chemical firm pointed to a $35m investment in emissions offsets and said “the facility’s emissions are at an historical low”. The company “remains committed to implementing the emissions reductions achieved as we turn the page from this relentless and draining attack on our business”, the statement added.
According to the complaint filed in 2023, emissions from the plant pose “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare”. The lawsuit had specifically singled out the risk to children living near the plant and those attending an elementary school situated close to the plant’s fence line. It noted that average readings at an air monitor near the school between April 2018 to January 2023 showed that those under 16 could surpass the EPA’s excess cancer risk rate within two years of their life.
On Friday, Taylor vowed to continue pushing back against pollution.
“We are going to fight them and prepare ourselves to keep going. We were preparing for the worst, and I don’t know how it could get any worse now that the government has totally abandoned us, it seems.”
DuPont did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
