A region near the Canadian border, whose mines provide most of the new ore used in producing domestic steel — and cars — has a lot at stake as trade wars intensify.
Once a week, most weeks, the ground in Chisholm, Minn., shudders underfoot. “When they blast over here, we can feel it in town over there,” Jed Holewa, a City Council member, explained as he looked out over the pit of the Hibbing Taconite mine, a machine-made canyon of flint-colored earth extending to the hills just southwest of town.
The low rumble of controlled explosions is reassuring in an area where few livelihoods are more than a couple of degrees removed from the mines. But this month the ground beneath the Iron Range has begun to shift in a very different way.
The sedimentary rock known as taconite, found in abundance in northern Minnesota, yields most of the United States’ iron ore, which in turn is made into steel used by the American auto industry. Thus the seismic effects of President Trump’s March 26 announcement of a 25 percent tariff on all cars and auto parts imported into the United States. The measure is meant to benefit the domestic auto industry, and has earned praise from labor leaders.
For the rest of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/trump-tariffs-canada-minnesota-iron-range.html