During his sole term in office, former President Joe Biden claimed a place among the nation’s most prolific creators of national monuments. Now President Donald Trump could set a new kind of record as the first president to abolish monuments.
Environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers are casting a wary eye on where, and when, Trump might aim a new legal directive that argues he has the power to wipe out national monuments created by his predecessors in the White House.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) recently published an opinion overturning nearly 90-year-old guidance that said presidents could not revoke monument status.
“We’ve never lived in a world where the president at his whim can abolish a monument and what that means exactly; we will have to see,” said Justin Pidot, a law professor at the University of Arizona who previously worked at the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. “But it massively scales back the protective power of the Antiquities Act.”
The White House did not respond to questions about whether Trump will follow the guidance and, if so, which of the nearly 140 national monuments he plans to target.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said this spring that resizing national monuments is “not … a top priority of the administration,” noting that the process would include a thorough review.
But the Justice Department document states that the Trump administration asked for a review of whether the president can revoke both the Sáttítla Highlands and the Chuckwalla national monuments in California, which were created by Biden in January.
The Trump administration is also looking closely at other monuments. Six total appeared in April on a short list of monuments that could see reductions after the Bureau of Land Management conducted an internal review of areas with existing mineral withdrawals. At that time, a draft review of the Interior Department’s strategic plan indicated the administration would seek to “right-size” national monuments, although that language was taken out of the latest version of the plan.
The potential erasure or significant reduction of those sites — which include Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands, as well as monuments in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah — would mark a major change in public lands. Congress itself has abolished fewer than a dozen monuments since it adopted the Antiquities Act of 1906.
During his first term, Trump did not move to abolish any monuments, although he did sign a proclamation shrinking two large monuments in Utah. Biden reversed that move in 2021.
There is also the possibility Trump could further target marine national monuments. He opened a vast site in the Pacific Ocean to commercial fishing earlier this year, and ordered reviews for potential access to the other four marine monuments.
Here are a look at some of the sites the Trump administration could alter or erase:
California
Chuckwalla National Monument
Situated where the Colorado and Mojave deserts meet in Southern California desert, Chuckwalla was designated in the final weeks of the Biden administration to protect its untrammeled desert canyons, its military and Indigenous history.
The lands include the footprint of several Native American tribes, including petroglyphs, cultural and archaeological sites, connected to the Iviatim, Kwatsáan and Maara’yam people. It’s dotted with relics of California’s historic mining culture, including old mine shafts, as well as training grounds used for U.S. troops in the World War II era.
The monument forms the California end of an 18-million-acre connected corridor of public lands that stretches roughly 600 miles from the Mojave Desert to Moab, Utah.
Prior to Biden creating the monument, renewable energy developers raised concerns that increased federal protections would limit their ability to move power across the desert, but the final boundary included a carve-out for transmission lines. Though the lands do not have active oil, gas or mining activities, a man that holds an amateur mining claim in the Chuckwalla mountains has sued to overturn the monument designation, which is also opposed by a group that advocates for motorized vehicle recreation.
But the monument has political support from state Democrats: California Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Raul Ruiz introduced legislation in 2024 proposing to establish the monument.
Sáttítla Highlands National Monument
The 200,000-acre Sáttítla monument is located in the shadow of Mount Shasta in the remote pine forests of Northern California. The region is the ancestral homeland of the Pit River and Modoc people and holds significance for several other Native American tribes. The Pit River Tribe has advocated for the designation for several decades.
Like with Chuckwalla, Biden created the monument in the final days of his administration in 2025.
Sáttítla, which translates to “obsidian place” in the Ajumawi language, hosts obsidian deposits that were used by ancient people for tools. It consists of dense forests and old volcanoes. The monument also sits atop aquifers that form the underground headwaters for California rivers. Sáttítla’s night skies are among the darkest in the country.
The monument includes parts of the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath national forests and is managed by the Forest Service.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), whose district includes the monument, has said the designation is an example of federal overreach and argued that the monument shouldn’t impede hunting, recreation or wildfire management in the region.
Arizona
Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument
Established by Biden in August 2023, the 917,618-acre national monument was the fifth and largest monument he created.
Biden designated the monument to protect a landscape surrounding the Grand Canyon in Arizona that Native American tribes say is crucial to their cultural identities. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam” for the Havasupai Tribe, and I’tah Kukveni means “our footprints” for the Hopi Tribe.
“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have traveled to the Grand Canyon, awed by its majesty. But few are aware of its full history,” Biden said during a proclamation signing ceremony in Red Butte, Arizona. “From time immemorial, more than a dozen tribal nations have lived, gathered, prayed on these lands.”
Biden also noted during the ceremony that these tribes “were forced out” of the region by the designation in 1919 of the Grand Canyon National Park.
While the designation was celebrated by tribes and environmental groups, it drew condemnation from House Republicans and the mining industry, which argued it now blocked new uranium mining at a time when the U.S. should be looking to become more energy independent.
Uranium is critical in nuclear reactors, and the lawmakers argued that curbing domestic mining would create an overdependence on foreign-mined material from Russia and other adversaries.
Native American tribal leaders argued the monument designation was needed to protect critical waterways in the drought-stricken region from the threats of pollution from potential uranium mining.
The monument is comprised of three distinct areas to the south, northeast and northwest of Grand Canyon National Park, bordered by the Kanab watershed boundary and the Kanab Creek drainage on the northwest, the Havasupai Indian Reservation and Navajo Nation to the south, and stretching from Marble Canyon to the edge of the Kaibab Plateau on the northeast side.
The national monument lands include deep canyons with creeks and streams that eventually flow into the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to millions of people across the Southwest.
Biden’s designation of the monument was part of an effort by his administration to protect lands considered sacred to Native Americans. Just five months before he signed the proclamation creating the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints monument, Biden established in March 2023 the 506,814-acreAvi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada to protect lands considered sacred to Yuman-speaking Native American tribes.
The Arizona monument, on lands managed by the Forest Service and BLM, established a tribal commission that includes representatives of a dozen tribes that lobbied for the monument. The tribal commission are co-stewards of the site.
Ironwood Forest National Monument
The Arizona national monument overseen by BLM was designated by former President Bill Clinton on June 9, 2000, and celebrated its 25th anniversary last Monday — a fact BLM highlighted last week on its Facebook page and in a post on the social media platform X.
The national monument, located 25 miles northwest of Tucson, is home to one of the Sonoran Desert’s largest collections of the monument’s namesake Ironwood trees, which can live more than 800 years.
Three sites within the monument — the Los Robles Archaeological District, Mission of Santa Ana del Chiquiburitac and Cocoraque Butte Archaeological District — are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, mostly due to rock art depicting human occupation of the region dating back 5,000 years.
More than 140,000 people visited the monument last year, according to BLM.
But its nearly 129,000-acre footprint, along with its mineral resource potential and the fact that Clinton designated it in the closing months of his presidency, have long made the monument a target of critics.
Clinton’s proclamation withdrew the area “from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or leasing or other disposition under the public land laws,” including “from disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing, other than by exchange that furthers the protective purposes of the monument.”
The region, including the national monument site itself, has a history of mining dating back hundreds of years with the Hohokam people first mining the area for turquoise. Later, frontier settlers began to mine there, and the monument site contains the remnants of old mining camps dating back to the 1800s. Today, the Silver Bell mine, located on private land adjacent to the monument, produces large quantities of copper, lead, zinc and silver ore each year.
Citing the potential for large mineral resources, among other things, Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar led an effort with other GOP lawmakers during Trump’s first term in 2017 to rescind proclamations establishing Ironwood Forest and three other national monuments in the state.
Trump did not act on the lawmakers’ push during his first term.
Tom Hannagan, president of Friends of Ironwood Forest, said when reports first surfaced in April that the Interior Department might cut the size of the site that such a move “would open the door to irreversible destruction of vital Sonoran Desert habitat that is beloved by both our local community and tens of thousands of visitors each year.”
New Mexico
Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument
Former President Barack Obama created the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in 2014, after a multiyear effort by New Mexico’s Senate delegation stalled out on Capitol Hill.
The 496,000-acre site — the largest Obama designated at that time, but which would later be eclipsed — closely mirrored a proposal from New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich and then-Sen. Tom Udall, both Democrats. The designation was made, in part, to protect the area from future mining or energy development, as well as to maintain access for hunting, recreation and ranching.
The monument, which sits about 10 miles east of Las Cruces, is known for the 9,000-foot high Organ Mountains; narrow canyons; and a range of habitat including woodlands range, desert and ponderosa pine.
Visitation to the BLM site has boomed in the wake of its designation, with an estimated 612,000 visitors in 2023 and a $35 million boost to the local economy, according to one study.
Utah
Bears Ears National Monument
The sweeping 1.36-million-acre monument in southeastern Utah sits at the heart of Trump’s desire to take a new approach to federal lands.
During his first term in office, Trump — at the behest of Utah Republicans who had argued that the site represented federal overreach and should not have been created by Obama — excised more than 1.1 million acres from the site.
He signed a proclamation in 2017 in a lavish ceremony in Utah’s state Capitol building in Salt Lake City, surrounded by state and federal officials.
The move would ultimately trigger a lawsuit from the five Native American tribes that lobbied to create the site — the Hopi, Zuni, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Navajo Nation — and asserted that Trump overreached his authority when he shrank the boundaries.
With that case still pending, Biden would reverse the reduction in 2021, and trigger another lawsuit by the state of Utah, which argued the Democrat had overreached by creating too large a monument.
Both cases remain pending in federal court.
In the meantime, the monument, managed by BLM, continues to draw visitors to popular sites like “Newspaper Rock” petroglyph panel and for hiking, backpacking, rock climbing and off-highway vehicle use.
The monument is also home to archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings like the “House on Fire.”
In 2024, the monument received more than 416,000 visits, according to a BLM report.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
The largest land-based monument in the continental United States, this 1.9-million-acre southwestern Utah site has been a point of contention since its creation in 1996 by Clinton.
During the first Trump administration, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote that the site is home to “an estimated several billions tons of coal and large oil deposits,” which are restricted from access due to the site’s monument status.
Clinton’s decision to establish the site was in fact done in part to lock up a massive coal deposit — estimated at some 72 million tons — in the area’s Kaiparowits Plateau while preserving its cliffs, slot canyons and sandstone arches. The federal government would subsequently pay $19.5 million to purchase back coal leases in the area.
A research area established in that same region is known by scientists as the “Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry,” due to the large number and variety of fossil and bone fragments discovered there.
Much like the Bears Ears monument, Trump slashed the Grand Staircase-Escalante site in his first term, removing 700,000 acres from the site. Biden subsequently restored the boundaries.
