President Donald Trump has signed executive orders dramatically reducing the size of two national monuments in southern Utah, rolling back protections for landscapes considered sacred by multiple Native American tribes and potentially opening vast stretches of land to mining and energy development. The reductions — of close to 1.5 million acres each — affect Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, two of the largest protected land designations in the American West. Together, the monuments span more than 3.2 million acres, an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.

Bears Ears, established by President Barack Obama in 2016, was the first national monument created at the explicit request of tribal nations. The landscape contains ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites, petroglyphs and cliff dwellings sacred to five tribes: the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute. Grand Staircase-Escalante, a sweeping terrain of cliffs, canyons and natural arches first protected by President Bill Clinton in 1996, holds significant coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area contains uranium deposits. Both monuments were designated under the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that grants presidents authority to protect sites of historic, archaeological or cultural significance. The act has been used by presidents of both parties, though legal scholars have long debated whether it also authorises a president to shrink existing monuments.

Trump, flanked at the White House signing ceremony by Utah Governor Spencer Cox, framed the decision as returning land to the people.