Coastal GasLink is the 670-kilometer fracked-gas pipeline running from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat. It crosses the unceded territory of the Wet\'suwet\'en Nation, whose hereditary chiefs — exercising authority recognized in the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Delgamuukw — never granted consent. Since 2018, Wet\'suwet\'en land defenders and their allies have built, and rebuilt, encampments and checkpoints across the pipeline corridor. Royal Canadian Mounted Police raids have cleared those encampments repeatedly, including in militarized 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 enforcement operations.
The U.S. dimension
The U.S. dimension to the Wet\'suwet\'en defense matters because the U.S.-based Indigenous-solidarity and climate-defense networks have provided ongoing material, legal, and physical support to the land-defense camps for nearly a decade. By 2024, that support work had produced a documentable cohort of U.S.-based defendants facing charges in either U.S. or Canadian courts — and, in a small but consequential number of cases, U.S. federal charges arising from associated U.S.-side actions.
What 2024 produced in U.S. courts
Through 2024, U.S. federal and state prosecutors brought charges in connection with:
- 2024 RBC Royal Bank actions across the United States: Solidarity-with-Wet\'suwet\'en pickets and lock-downs at RBC Royal Bank branches (RBC is the principal financier of Coastal GasLink) produced misdemeanor and in several jurisdictions felony state-court charges in U.S. cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston.
- U.S. petitioners in Canadian contempt proceedings: A small number of U.S. citizens detained at Wet\'suwet\'en camps in late 2023 / early 2024 were charged under Canadian contempt of the Coastal GasLink injunction. Cross-border extradition or travel-restriction questions came back to U.S. courts.
- The "Tiny House Warrior" and adjacent matters: Indigenous-led tiny-house camps on the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline route in B.C. produced cross-border legal complications resolved in U.S. courts in late 2024.
- Doxxing and surveillance suits: U.S.-based defenders alleging surveillance and harassment by private security contractors hired by TC Energy / Coastal GasLink filed civil suits in U.S. district court in 2024.
The shared template
The U.S. side of these prosecutions adopted, in 2024, much of the same charging architecture that the Cop City and Reznicek cases produced — domestic-terrorism enhancements on non-violent property defense, conspiracy theories on coalition movements, RICO-adjacent theories on coordinated direct action. The cross-border element added complications: Canadian disclosure rules, RCMP intelligence-sharing with U.S. agencies, and the practical question of how a U.S. defendant can mount a defense to an alleged offense that occurred on or about unceded Indigenous land in another country.
What this connects to
The U.S. Wet\'suwet\'en-solidarity prosecutions sit alongside Standing Rock-era defendants (Reznicek being the most prominent), the Stop Line 3 prosecutions in Minnesota, and the ongoing prosecutions of Mountain Valley Pipeline defenders in Virginia and West Virginia. The 2024 cohort represents the continuation of a roughly decade-long federal-court track record of treating Indigenous-led pipeline-defense as a federal-charging matter.
NPPC tracks U.S.-based Wet\'suwet\'en-solidarity cases and publishes updates as 2024 indictments move toward trial or resolution.
