Donald Trump approved a sharp reduction in the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah on Monday, moving to shrink two protected landscapes by close to a million and a half acres each. At a White House signing event, Trump said, “They took the land from the people quite honestly,” and added, “We’re giving it back.”
The move is landing now because it immediately reopened a fight that has already run through one presidency and another. The monuments were created under the Antiquities Act, then cut back by Trump in 2017 before those reductions were later reversed by the Biden administration. This time, the same clash is back in sharper form, with the White House framing the action as a return of land while tribal and environmental advocates say it is an unlawful stripping of protections from places they consider irreplaceable.
Davina Smith-Idjesa said the decision was “heartbreaking” on Monday. She said tribal leaders had braced for a reduction since Trump was elected to a second term, and accused federal officials of sidestepping their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be affected. She also said, “From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” and described it as “a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”
Those stakes are not abstract. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante contain ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, but they also sit over coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development. Spencer Cox said the monuments should be the smallest area possible to protect antiquities, arguing that multimillion-acre monuments bigger than the state of Delaware do not fit that standard.
The friction is that Trump is treating the reductions as a restoration while opponents say the law does not give a president the power to erase what was protected before. Heidi McIntosh said Trump’s attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is “just as illegal today as it was in 2017,” and said the Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, “not to destroy them.” She called the proclamations “a slap to the face” of public lands visitors, local communities and tribes that have spent years trying to protect the places.
Earthjustice said it would take legal action to maintain protections for the monuments, setting up the next phase of a dispute that now appears headed out of the signing room and into court. What remains unresolved is how much land will ultimately stay protected, and whether this latest reduction survives the same legal fight that undid Trump’s first effort.
