WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation that would prevent the Trump administration from rescinding a Native American tribe’s contested reservation in Massachusetts.

The amendment, included in a broader spending package passed by the Democratic-controlled chamber on July 24, bars the Interior Department from revoking its 2015 decision to place some 300 acres of land into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

The legislation also would prevent the agency from reversing a corresponding declaration of the lands as the tribe’s sovereign reservation, where it could legally build a casino under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

“In recent months, the Trump administration has used the COVID-19 pandemic as cover to try to steal the Tribe’s land and define their people out of existence,” U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, a Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the bill, said in a written statement. “This amendment will put an immediate stop to those dangerous efforts.”

U.S. Rep. William Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat who also sponsored the measure, said it will limit the administration’s “constant efforts to undermine the Tribe’s rights.” He said the issue is about “people, their rights, their health, their education, and their livelihoods.”

In March, the Trump administration moved to undo the 2015 decision, declaring that then-President Barack Obama’s administration had no authority to put land into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe since it only became federally recognized relatively recently.