President Donald Trump on Monday reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah by roughly 90%, stripping protections from lands sacred to Native American tribes and opening the door to coal and uranium mining. The combined monuments, which had spanned more than 3.2 million acres—an area nearly the size of Connecticut—now cover less than 303,000 acres. It's a sharper reduction than Trump imposed during his first term.
Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of tribal nations. Established 10 years ago by President Barack Obama, it honored five tribes in the region: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute. The area contains hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance, including ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and rock paintings. Grand Staircase-Escalante, established 30 years ago by President Bill Clinton, holds scenic canyons, archaeological sites and natural arches.
"Heartbreaking" for Tribal Nations
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, called the move "heartbreaking." She accused federal officials of sidestepping their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be affected. "From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land," Smith-Idjesa said. "This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors' footprints."
Tribal leaders had braced for a reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies, a collaborative structure now undermined by the dramatic shrinkage of protected land.
Mining Interests vs. Conservation
The areas hold coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development. Trump said at a White House signing event, "They took the land from the people quite honestly. We're giving it back." Utah Gov. Spencer Cox celebrated the decision, saying, "This is a big day for Utah." He added that monument designations are "supposed to be the smallest area as possible to protect the antiquities."
But monument designation provides sweeping protections not just for geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump's move say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for critical minerals.
Trump asserted Monday that people cannot hunt, fish or "virtually not even walk" on the monuments. Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said that was false. Hunting, fishing, camping and other recreation are permitted under state and federal regulations.
Reversal of Biden's Conservation Goals
The move comes as Trump and other Republicans have reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in Western states. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.
Trump's policies are largely the opposite of President Joe Biden's, who designated or expanded more than a dozen monuments and had a goal to conserve at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. Trump wants to tap into the natural resource wealth of federal lands that total more than 100,000 square miles and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said, "Today's executive action is another chapter in this administration's war on the West." He added that Trump was "turning the Antiquities Act on its head."
Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last year that federal officials would review and consider redrawing monument boundaries as part of a push to expand U.S. energy production. Trump in his current term has also used proclamations to lift commercial fishing prohibitions within expansive marine monuments in the Pacific Ocean and in the Atlantic Ocean off the New England coast.
Why This Matters:
The reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante represents the largest rollback of protected public lands in modern American history, prioritizing extractive industries over cultural preservation and environmental stewardship. For Native American tribes, the decision undermines decades of advocacy to protect ancestral lands and sacred sites from commercial exploitation. The move also signals a broader shift in how the federal government manages the more than 640 million acres of public land held in trust for all Americans. When protections are stripped from nationally significant landscapes to facilitate mining and drilling, future generations lose access to irreplaceable cultural and natural heritage. The conflict between development interests and conservation reflects competing visions of who benefits from public lands—corporations seeking profit or communities seeking to preserve history, culture and ecological health for the long term.