environmentalists

July 14 (UPI) — President Donald Trump has signed a pair of executive orders shrinking two southern Utah national monuments by more than a million acres each, sparking anger from environmentalists who say the moves will open the formerly protected lands to exploration.

The executive orders reduce the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from 1.87 million acres to about 181,500 acres and the Bears Ears National Monument from 1.36 million acres to 121,100 acres. Both are located in redrock country.

Trump signed the orders on Monday in the Oval Office while surrounded by Utah’s Republican leadership, including Gov. Spencer Cox, Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis and several GOP House representatives.

“This is a big day for Utah,” Cox said.

The executive orders mark the latest development in the nearly decade-long tug-of-war over the size of the monuments, though Republicans have opposed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and its 1.7-million-acre boundary since President Bill Clinton designated it in 1996. The Bears Ears National Monument was designated by President Barack Obama in late 2016.

During his first term, Trump shrunk both monuments — Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by almost half — only for President Joe Biden to restore both of them to their previous boundaries in 2021.

Republicans, including Cox, argue that the monuments violate the Antiquities Act, which limits the designation to the smallest parcel of land necessary for the proper care and management of the objects to be protected. In a White House fact sheet on the executive orders, the Trump administration argues that the term “objects of historic or scientific interest” has been stretched to include landscapes and biodiversity.

“Now, we care. We definitely care about protecting these antiquities and will continue to do so. The problem is with these giant monument designations, there are resources that come with those,” Cox said at the White House press conference.

“We’re grateful that the president has made a determination that we need to rightsize these monuments.”

He added that this will not remove protections already in place, but will make “the monuments more manageable so that we have the resources necessary to continue to protect these antiquities.”

Trump criticized the size of the monuments, saying the designations prevented the public from using the land.

“You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it,” he said, though the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources states that people can hunt and fish in both monuments.

Environmental groups have been fighting to maintain the size of both monuments since Trump originally shrunk them, pointing to the fact that Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated due to its wide array of scientific and historic resources and Bears Ears was created following a proposal by five Tribal Nations.

Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said Monday’s executive orders make clear that Utah is the “epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands.”

“These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation,” Braden said in a statement, adding that the group would challenge the executive orders in court.

“We are confident that President Trump’s reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected and the monuments restored.”

According to the Center for Western Priorities, the executive orders may open the land formerly part of the monuments for sale or lease to oil, gas, mining and logging companies within 60 days.

“The people of Utah and the entire country have spoken with one voice: These lands belong to all of us, not Mike Lee, President Trump or the mining companies his kids are in business with,” CWP Executive Director Aaron Weiss said in a statement.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Environmental groups say that the timing of the expected closure of an immigration detention center in the middle of the Florida Everglades, likely in the next month or two, is no accident because it will come as their lawsuit challenging its existence returns to a federal judge who had previously ordered it shut down.

A federal appellate court decided last month to keep open the detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” for the time being, blocking a lower court decision ordering it to wind down operations. But the case was sent back to the lower court judge who now gets jurisdiction over the lawsuit as the litigation over the facility’s fate continues.

“Knowing that the same district judge who previously enjoined the operation would soon reassume oversight — the defendants are now effectively waving the white flag,” said Paul Schwiep, an attorney for the environmental groups that had sued, saying the facility’s construction hadn’t undergone a required environmental review.

When asked about the future of the state-run facility and its costs on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he hadn’t gotten any “official word” that federal authorities are going to stop sending detainees to the center.

But vendors who supply and help run the facility have been told that the closure could be as soon as next month, according to reports Tuesday by the New York Times and CBS News Miami. The Florida Department of Emergency Management, which operates the detention center, didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry on Wednesday. The Republican governor’s press secretary, Molly Best, referred questions about the facility to the state emergency management agency.

“We didn’t build any permanent facilities down there because we knew it was going to be temporary,” DeSantis said Wednesday at a news conference in Titusville, Fla.

DeSantis’ administration opened the facility in July to support the immigration crackdown by the administration of President Trump, who visited the detention center last summer. An attorney for two detainees has accused guards of severely beating and pepper-spraying detainees. Other detainees have said worms turn up in the food, toilets don’t flush and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.

“This monument to cruelty, waste and environmental and tribal lands abuse should have never been built,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, said Tuesday.

Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity sued state and federal officials a short time after the facility opened, claiming the remote airstrip site in the Everglades wasn’t given a proper environmental review required by federal law before it was converted into an immigration detention center. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami agreed and ordered in August that the facility must wind down operations within two months.

The appellate court blocked the order, saying the Florida-run facility wasn’t under federal control and didn’t need to comply with federal law requiring an environmental impact review.

But the appellate court made clear that once Florida got federal reimbursement for the facility, it would have to comply with the federal environmental law, Schwiep said.

DeSantis said Tuesday that the state expected to be reimbursed by the federal government for $608 million, which has already been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“There’s no negotiations on that,” he said.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.