Iron County Circuit Judge John Anderson spent nearly four hours Thursday at the Bayfield County Courthouse in Washburn asking one question: does this appeal actually have a chance? His answer determines whether Enbridge’s Line 5 reroute keeps moving dirt in northern Wisconsin while the courts work through it.
The case landed before Anderson after an administrative court judge approved permits in February for a 41-mile reroute of the existing pipeline through Iron County. That approval set off an appeal by the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and allied environmental groups, who immediately asked for a stay to halt construction while the challenge proceeds.
Background matters here. The original Line 5 corridor crossed the Bad River reservation, and courts found that was an illegal trespass on tribal land. Enbridge’s response was to draw a new route. The tribe’s position is that a new route doesn’t erase the underlying harm.
That’s where Earthjustice attorney John Petoskey came in Thursday.
Petoskey stood before Judge Anderson and argued that the Band’s stake in this isn’t just about easements or property boundaries. “The natural landscape is far more than a resource. It’s a way of life,” Petoskey said, as reported by Michigan Advance. “That way of life requires a sustainable environment. It’s undisputed that the project will cause an impact.”
When Anderson pushed him on what constitutes truly irreversible harm, Petoskey pointed straight at the wetlands along the reroute corridor. Wetlands that haven’t been touched in a century don’t just bounce back, he argued. “When wetlands are destroyed, they don’t clean water or control floods and no longer provide services that help the tribe,” he said.
He didn’t stop there. Petoskey told the court the new pipeline corridor would create a buffer zone around the reservation where tribal members who enter could face felony charges. That’s not a compromise. That’s a new constraint layered onto land the tribe has used for generations.
The legal argument for the stay isn’t purely environmental. Attorneys opposing the project told Anderson that Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources misread a state statute governing navigable waterways when it signed off on Enbridge’s permits. If the DNR got that statutory call wrong, the permits were invalid at the moment of issuance, and construction shouldn’t be advancing while a court decides whether to unwind them. That’s the legal thread the tribe is asking Anderson to pull.
Attorneys for Enbridge and the DNR pushed back hard. They argued the permitting process was exhaustive, drew significant public scrutiny, and cleared every procedural hurdle the state requires. Courts don’t stop multi-hundred-million-dollar infrastructure projects on a whim, they said. Reversing course mid-construction would cause serious harm on Enbridge’s side too, and the judicial review, they contended, isn’t likely to succeed on the merits.
Anderson didn’t rule from the bench Thursday. He’s making a threshold determination: if he doesn’t believe the appeal can win, he won’t issue a stay regardless of what harm the tribe documents. Permit opponents can also challenge the project through the Army Corps of Engineers’ permitting database, though that’s a separate federal track from what’s before Anderson right now.
What’s happening in Washburn is a familiar tension in Wisconsin resource fights, just with higher stakes than most. The April 27, 2026 hearing stretched nearly four hours because neither side has weak arguments. Enbridge’s permits cleared a real process. The tribe’s concerns about permanent wetland loss and new criminal exposure for tribal members are documented and specific.
The 41-mile reroute through Iron County is long enough to cross five county supervisor districts and touches watershed systems that drain toward Lake Superior. That’s the geography Anderson is deciding whether to freeze.
His ruling could come within days. If he issues the stay, construction stops and the appeal proceeds on a longer timeline. If he doesn’t, Enbridge keeps working while the courts catch up, and Petoskey’s argument about irreversible harm stops being hypothetical.
