President Donald Trump smiled as he signed away nearly three million acres of protected public land in Utah, handing out souvenir pens while tribal leaders described the loss of their ancestral homeland as heartbreaking.
In a live-streamed Oval Office ceremony on 13 July 2026, the president signed two proclamations shrinking the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90 percent each, the largest rollback of public-land protections in American history.
