The Trump administration has invoked wartime emergency powers to pump $75 million into a coal export terminal in West Oakland, handing a decade-long legal victory to developer Phil Tagami just as community organizers launch a new strategy to stop him through the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

The June 4 announcement — part of a $700 million White House coal investment package using the Defense Production Act — resets a battle that has churned through Oakland City Hall, state courts, and a federal bankruptcy proceeding in Kentucky. For residents of West Oakland, one of the Bay Area's most pollution-burdened neighborhoods, it raises a pointed question: when local government loses every legal round, what tools are left?

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act — the same wartime authority used to marshal industrial output during national emergencies — to authorize the grant in an Oval Office appearance on June 4. The money flows to Oakland Bulk Oversized Terminal (OBOT), a project developer Phil Tagami has been pursuing on the former Oakland Army Base since 2015.

"Starting this summer, the West Gateway project will break ground," Trump told reporters, "and by summer 2028, over 12 million tons of clean beautiful coal per year will be shipped to countries all around the world."

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, who attended the press conference, framed the terminal in bluntly economic terms. He noted he had recently traveled to Japan and Taiwan, where energy companies expressed interest in American coal exports. "To be able to open that Oakland port is absolutely essential for the lifeblood of our state and our coal mines," Gordon said.

The terminal would sit on the former Oakland Army Base — city-owned land in West Oakland, a neighborhood that has fought the project through City Hall and the courts for a decade and lost at every turn.

In 2016, the Oakland City Council passed a coal handling ban. Federal courts ruled it didn't apply to OBOT. Oakland then terminated OBOT's lease, arguing the developer had missed construction deadlines. Tagami sued and won in 2023. The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case last year, clearing the path for the project to proceed.

A separate federal lawsuit, filed by Insight Terminal Solutions — the planned terminal operator, which went bankrupt amid the delays — is pending before a judge in Kentucky. The company alleges Oakland interfered with development and claims the city owes hundreds of millions in damages. Oakland denies liability. That case remains unresolved.

With the courts largely spent as a blocking mechanism, organizers with No Coal in Oakland — a coalition of residents, environmental advocates, faith leaders, and union members — have turned to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The group petitioned BAAQMD earlier this year to impose stricter particulate matter regulations, a move that could make it difficult or cost-prohibitive for any coal facility to operate in the region, even if it is built. Trump's $75 million grant, which dramatically improves the project's financial footing, makes that campaign more urgent and harder to win.

The stakes are concrete for West Oakland. State CalEnviroScreen data consistently ranks the neighborhood among the most pollution-burdened in California, battered by diesel freight traffic serving the Port of Oakland and industrial operations along the waterfront. Adding coal trains and bulk loading — critics say fine coal dust escapes during transfer — onto an already strained airshed is what residents and health advocates say they cannot accept.

Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement to Bloomberg: "Propping up coal billionaires with taxpayer money is one more way for the Trump administration to put polluters first and put the rest of us at risk."

The Guardian reported Sunday that West Oakland residents are actively rallying against the project, drawing on the neighborhood's history as a center of Black activism — from the Pullman Porters' union to the Black Panthers — to frame the terminal as the latest chapter in a long struggle to protect the community from industrial harm.

At his June 4 press conference, Trump blamed former presidents Biden and Obama for delaying the terminal. According to the Oaklandside, that claim is false: neither administration took any steps to stop the OBOT project.

Construction is now scheduled to begin this summer. The terminal's opponents are running out of courts. The air district is what they have left.