Lee Becquet doesn’t like to leave the house with his 2-year-old son, Eugene.
That’s because their home in Miami, Ariz., is downhill from an industrial facility that is one of the country’s largest sources of pollution containing lead, a powerful neurotoxin that can harm children’s health.
“I have a toddler, and I’m not putting him outside in that,” Mr. Becquet, 29, said in a recent interview. “So we stay inside for days sometimes.”
The facility, one of only two remaining copper smelters in the country, processes copper for use in electronics, construction materials and a range of other products.
Under rules put in place by the Biden administration, the facility’s owner, Freeport-McMoRan, would have been required to install technology to reduce its toxic emissions. But in October President Trump exempted the smelter from complying with limits on lead, arsenic, chromium and other hazardous pollutants for the next two years.
Freeport did not have to present an exhaustive argument for why it deserved a reprieve. There was no economic analysis or engineering study. It was as easy as sending an email to the Environmental Protection Agency, where a senior official provided guidance to a lawyer for the company, according to emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
It’s one of many efforts by the Trump administration to weaken or waive environmental protections that companies view as overly burdensome. In the past year, the administration has proposed rolling back more than a dozen regulations governing air pollution, water contamination and planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The new emails and documents show “secret coordination on a free pass to pollute,” said Vickie Patton, the general counsel at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which obtained the records by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
“There’s not a single instance in these records where the Trump E.P.A. officials asked about the impacts of these poisons on people in Miami,” Ms. Patton said. “And these are people who deserve to be protected by their government.”
Asked about the documents, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Brigit Hirsch, said in an email, “E.P.A. regularly engages with a wide range of stakeholders, including entities that we may regulate, and these engagements are an essential component of our work to protect human health and the environment.”
In 2024, the copper smelter emitted more than 11.6 tons of lead and 2.5 tons of arsenic, according to data the company reported to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
Linda Hayes, a spokeswoman for Freeport, which is based in Phoenix, said in a statement that the company was committed to “protecting the environment and health in the communities where we operate.” She said that two air monitors near the smelter had consistently shown levels of lead and arsenic “well below regulatory limits designed to safeguard public health.”
Still, Mr. Becquet said he planned to move away from the smelter to be near family outside Portland, Ore.
“I’m going to be able to leave because thankfully I got some help from my family,” he said. “But I’m angry on behalf of all the community members who cannot leave. They don’t want to live here, either. And they deserve to have clean air.”
A Change of Fortune
In 1907, amid a mining boom in the American Southwest, there were around 80 copper smelters in the country. Today, the Freeport facility is one of two still in operation.
The other, near Salt Lake City, is owned by the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto. The rest were too costly to continue running because of stringent environmental regulations, a glut of cheap Chinese copper and other factors.
Inside the Freeport facility, a furnace melts copper at 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit into a liquid that resembles lava. This molten metal is poured into molds to produce 750-pound slabs called anodes, which are then shipped to a refinery in Texas.
The Biden administration cracked down on pollution from this process in a rule finalized last year. To comply with the rule, Freeport would have needed to spend an estimated $59.5 million on an additional baghouse, a device that uses giant fabric filters to capture tiny particles of pollution.
Instead, Freeport asked a federal court to strike down the rule on the grounds that it was too strict. The San Carlos Apache Tribe, whose reservation is 10 miles from the copper smelter, argued in its own lawsuit that the rule was too weak.
Then Mr. Trump returned to the White House, and Freeport’s fortunes improved.
On March 24, the Trump administration created a novel way for companies to avoid clean-air rules: Simply send an email to the E.P.A. requesting an exemption. The administration said it was relying on an obscure provision of the Clean Air Act that allowed these exemptions if they were in the interest of national security.
Five days earlier, on March 19, a lawyer for Freeport emailed a Trump appointee at the E.P.A. saying that he had heard about the forthcoming move from a “mutual friend,” according to the documents reviewed by The Times.
Patrick Traylor, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, asked Abigale Tardif, a top official in the E.P.A.’s air office, for a “brief call” to discuss a possible exemption for Freeport. The call did not occur, but Ms. Tardif responded by email on March 24, giving Mr. Traylor advance notice of an E.P.A. web page on the exemption process that would go live later that day. She followed up that afternoon with a link to the web page.
Mr. Traylor wrote back that he was “inclined to submit a short request” for an exemption that included detailed information about the Freeport smelter. “Does that strike you as an approach that the E.P.A. would welcome and find helpful?” he asked.
Ms. Tardif replied, “I believe that is the right approach.”
A week later, on March 31, Freeport submitted a request claiming that compliance with the clean-air rule would cost the company as much as $309 million, or more than five times the Biden administration’s estimate. (Ms. Hayes, the Freeport spokeswoman, said the company had hired an outside engineering firm that found the “E.P.A. substantially underestimated the cost of installing additional controls at the smelter.”)
Over the following months, Mr. Trump granted exemptions from environmental rules to coal-burning power plants, steel mills, oil refineries and, finally, copper smelters. The exemption for copper smelters applied only to the facility owned by Freeport, not the one owned by Rio Tinto, which had already invested in new equipment to capture its pollution.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email that Mr. Trump had lifted onerous constraints on processing copper, a crucial component of electrical wiring, military vehicles and artificial intelligence data centers. “President Trump is providing regulatory relief and reducing burdensome restrictions to an industry vital to our national and economic security,” she said.
A Mining Town
On a drive around the Miami area, Freeport’s fingerprints are everywhere.
The mining company owns the field where the Little League team plays baseball and softball. Its donations support an “innovation lab” at the elementary school, where its smelter is visible from the playground. And a banner hanging from a gazebo at a public park lists Freeport as a sponsor of a Christmas display featuring a dozen animatronic reindeer.
In interviews, many residents said they were unaware of the exemption for the smelter, which came on a Friday evening and does not appear to have been reported in the local newspaper. Many were also reluctant to criticize Freeport, which supports around 950 permanent jobs in the area.
Cherish Hinton, 38, a former welder at Freeport’s copper mine in Morenci, Ariz., said it was hard to follow politics while caring for her 3-year-old son, Journey. Upon learning of the exemption, she said: “It’s for two years, right? Maybe give it a year and see if there are health impacts in the community.”
Even members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, which has argued in court that the Biden-era rule was too weak, were hesitant to criticize Freeport, a major employer on the reservation.
“You can’t say all the cancer or all the biggest health problems here are coming from the mining industry,” said Yvonne Lees, an epidemiologist with the tribe’s Department of Health and Human Services. “There are so many factors.”
In Gila County, which includes Miami, more than two-thirds of voters supported Mr. Trump in the 2024 election. Many liberal residents voiced more concern about the exemption than their conservative counterparts.
James Potts, 75, a retired machinist who considers himself a moderate Democrat, said he worried about the effects of breathing in the smelter’s emissions. “The air here is bad enough as it is,” said Mr. Potts, who has battled prostate cancer for the past decade.
But Izora Ayers, 84, a volunteer for a local church and a staunch Republican, said she was unbothered by the president’s proclamation. “He’s doing a lot of strange things, but I voted for him, and I’m still for him,” she said.
Ms. Ayers, who can see the smelter from her front windows, said the air quality had improved since she was growing up in Miami. Back then, she said, a sulfurous smog hung in the air, leaving the taste of rotten eggs in her mouth. The smog cleared after Freeport installed equipment to capture its sulfur dioxide emissions, she said. (Ms. Hayes, the Freeport spokeswoman, said this equipment had been added from 2013 to 2017 at a cost of $250 million.)
The smelter has still not installed the additional baghouse to capture more emissions of lead. High levels of exposure to lead in childhood can result in stomach pain, vomiting, fatigue, learning difficulties, developmental delays and seizures. While the most common source of exposure is paint in older homes, lead from industrial facilities like smelters can also accumulate in soil, research shows.
Evan Schmitz, an environmental health specialist at the Gila County health department, gets a phone call about once a month from a parent whose child was poisoned by lead, he said. But there is little data on the problem, he said, since few parents have their children’s blood tested for lead.
And when the county recently offered free testing for contaminants in well water, no one signed up, said Joshua Beck, the department’s director of public health and community services. “It’s a mining community, and they just don’t believe that these things are bad for them, or they don’t want to believe it,” he said.
Tests to Come
More data on the health effects of the smelter could be available soon.
In July, a contractor for Freeport began notifying residents of free testing for arsenic, lead and copper in the soil on their properties. After the contractor has collected and analyzed samples, it will remove and replace any contaminated soil.
It is unclear how long that process will take. But several residents said they were anxiously awaiting the results.
“I tried planting rose bushes, but nothing survives in this dirt,” said Sonia Yanez, 46, a public health educator and journalist who has lived in the area for her entire life.
“Since we were kids, the sunsets over the smelter have been really pretty orange colors,” Ms. Yanez added. “But imagine what they’re spewing into the air that we cannot see.”
Mr. Becquet, for his part, said he hopes to have moved by the time the results are ready.
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting from Washington and Hiroko Tabuchi contributed from New York.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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