On Monday afternoon, surrounded by Utah’s all-Republican congressional delegation in the Oval Office, Donald Trump gutted protected lands in Utah — Again.
He signed a pair of executive orders stripping federal protection from nearly 3 million acres in southern Utah.
Bears Ears National Monument shrinks from roughly 1.36 million acres to about 121,000 — a 91% cut.
Grand Staircase-Escalante drops from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 181,500 — a 90% cut.
These aren’t boundary adjustments. They’re erasures.
Trump called the previous protections “very unfair to the people of Utah” as he signed. Gov. Spencer Cox, Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis, and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz stood behind him, smiling.
You know who wasn’t in the room? Anyone from the five Tribal Nations — the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Zuni — stewards of their ancestral homelands.
The Tribal Nations spent a decade building the co-stewardship framework that Trump’s Sharpie just dismantled.
“Our Tribes were not informed” of plans to shrink protected lands in Utah
The tribes weren’t just excluded from the photo op. They weren’t consulted at all.
Autumn Gillard, a Southern Paiute woman who coordinates the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, issued a statement Monday.
“Our Tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable. The federal government must honor its Trust and Treaty obligations to our Tribes — it is not optional. Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with Tribes. It also profoundly disrespects our intergenerational Traditional Knowledge by destroying a framework for Tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands in which we invested years of effort. Today’s action cannot stand.”
Davina Smith–Idjesa, co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and a Navajo Nation representative, put the loss in human terms: Bears Ears — Shash Jaa’ in Diné — “holds our ancestors’ footsteps and our children’s future.”
This is what’s actually at stake. Bears Ears contains more than 100,000 archaeological sites — cliff dwellings, rock art, burial grounds, and ceremonial places that Indigenous peoples have tended since long before Utah existed.
Families still gather medicine, hold ceremony, and pray on this land.
Monday’s orders also tear up management plans finalized in January 2025 after years of Tribal collaboration and thousands of public comments — plans that Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy tried and failed to kill through Congress just last month.
When Congress wouldn’t do it, Trump did it by fiat.
We’ve seen this movie, and we know who profits
If this feels familiar, it should. Trump shrank both monuments in 2017 — Bears Ears by 85%, Grand Staircase by nearly half.
Sixty days later, the excised lands opened to new hardrock mining claims under a law written in 1872.
That first rollback wasn’t about “fairness to Utah.”
A New York Times investigation found that uranium firm Energy Fuels Resources lobbied extensively for the reductions, and the redrawn boundaries conveniently excluded hundreds of uranium claims.
The Bureau of Land Management has rated parts of Bears Ears as having high potential for uranium development.
Grand Staircase sits atop major coal reserves — and one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds in North America.
“As our nation marks 250 years, these public lands should be handed down, not over to drilling and mining interests,” Gillard said.
The timing makes the priorities even more obvious: Trump signed these orders while the Babylon Fire — the largest wildfire in the country — burned across more than 100,000 acres of southeastern Utah, filling these same landscapes with smoke.
The legal fight starts now
Here’s the thing Trump’s Oval Office celebration glossed over: no court has ever ruled that a president can do this.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the power to create national monuments.
It says nothing about shrinking or revoking them — a question legal scholars have flagged for decades.
When Trump cut the monuments in 2017, the tribes sued within hours, followed by conservation groups and Patagonia.
Those cases were never decided, because President Biden restored the monuments in 2021 before the courts could rule.
Now the question is coming back — with force.
Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, promised before the ink was dry: “we will sue the administration for that unlawful action.”
Earthjustice, which has defended the monuments in court for years, says it’s ready to go again.
Democratic members of Congress and Tribal leaders are holding a joint press conference Tuesday, and Ben McAdams — favored to become Utah’s lone Democrat in Congress next year — vowed he won’t stop until the cuts are reversed.
Until the courts act, the clock is ticking.
If this rollback follows the 2017 playbook, mining companies could start staking claims on formerly protected land within about 60 days.
Three million acres of sacred, irreplaceable public land — home to a hundred thousand archaeological sites, gutted in a closed-door signing without a single Tribal voice in the room, for the benefit of uranium and coal interests.
That’s not returning land to “the people of Utah.” The people who have belonged to this land the longest were never even asked.
