Sammi🦋@StoriesBySammi
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante just lost 2.9 MILLION acres of protection... not to save the land. To mine it.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated in 1996 by Bill Clinton, one of the largest monuments in the Lower 48, home to a fossil record so rich it's produced dinosaur species previously unknown to science.
Bears Ears came 20 years later in 2016, after the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute spent years fighting for it themselves, the first time tribes successfully designed and helped manage protection of their own ancestral homeland.
Trump cut both once already, in 2017. Bears Ears by 85%, Grand Staircase by nearly half. Biden restored them fully in 2021.
This time, he didn't just repeat it. He obliterated it. Bears Ears drops from 1.36 million acres to about 121,000. Grand Staircase drops from 1.87 million acres to about 181,500. Combined, more than 2.9 million acres stripped of protection in a single afternoon, the largest rollback of public land protection in American history.
This wasn't improvised. Project 2025 called Trump's first-term cuts "insufficient" because only one state was touched, and demanded a second round, more sweeping this time. This is that round.
It goes further still: Project 2025 says the administration must "vigorously defend" these cuts specifically to force a Supreme Court ruling on whether presidents can abolish monuments entirely. If that ruling favors Trump, every one of the 31 national monuments managed by the BLM nationwide becomes vulnerable, from Utah to Arizona to Maine, which Project 2025 already names as a future target.
The new proclamation for Bears Ears specifically calls out the minerals now open for extraction: copper and uranium. Sacred land, ancestral homeland, more than 100,000 archaeological sites, and the plan is mining.
None of the five tribes who helped build Bears Ears' management plan were consulted this time. And it's happening while the largest wildfire currently burning in the country rages inside Bears Ears itself.
91% of Western voters, including 87% of Trump's own supporters, want monuments protected, not shrunk. Utah polling backs that up too, most Utahns want the monuments kept intact.
Since when does "unfair to the people of Utah" mean setting up a Supreme Court case to strip protection from every monument in the country?
#DemsUnited
