Patagonia, Tribes and Conservationists Reopen 2017 Lawsuit Over Trump's 3-Million-Acre Cut to Utah Monuments

Patagonia and a coalition of Indigenous tribes, conservation groups and climbing advocates filed a motion Wednesday, September 2, to reopen a nine-year-old lawsuit against the federal government over the size of two Utah national monuments.

The move comes after President Trump signed proclamations on July 13 cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from 1.87 million acres to about 181,500 acres, and Bears Ears National Monument from 1.36 million acres to about 121,100 acres, according to the Daily Caller. Combined, that's nearly 3 million acres stripped of monument protection, according to Courthouse News Service.

Trump cut both monuments during his first term in 2017, prompting Patagonia and the same core group of plaintiffs to sue. That case never reached a verdict. President Biden restored full protections by proclamation on October 8, 2021, and the litigation was shelved as moot, according to Backpacker.

Who's Suing and Why

The coalition suing now includes Patagonia, the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the Zuni Tribe, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Access Fund, Earthjustice (representing Grand Canyon Trust and WildEarth Guardians), Utah Diné Bikéyah, Friends of Cedar Mesa, Archaeology Southwest, the Conservation Lands Foundation, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, according to the Guardian and Backpacker.

Their 50-page second amended complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues the Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the power to declare monuments, not abolish or shrink them, according to Courthouse News Service. "Congress did not authorize presidents to revoke national monument status," the coalition wrote in the filing.

Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert called the cuts "a betrayal of Tribal sovereignty" in a company blog post, and said the proclamations amount to an effort to "force secession of federal land to the state and allow private companies to extract natural resources from that land," according to the Guardian. Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund, which represents several of the tribes, said in a statement that "it is Tribal Nations' sovereign right to steward Tribal homelands."

The Administration's Case

The White House has defended the cuts as correcting decades of executive overreach. In its July proclamations, the administration argued the Antiquities Act "has been stretched to include landscape areas, biodiversity, 'viewsheds,' and 'remoteness'" well beyond its original intent of protecting specific historic and scientific objects, according to the Daily Caller.

The administration said "rightsizing" the monuments restores "public access and traditional multiple-use activities on these Federal lands," including grazing, timber harvest, fishing, hunting, resource development and motorized recreation. Multiple-use advocates and rural Utah communities have long argued that sprawling monument designations lock up land and economic activity far beyond what's needed to protect specific archaeological sites. Utah's Republican governor, Spencer Cox, and the state's congressional delegation have supported reducing the monuments, according to the Independent.

What's Actually at Stake on the Ground

Mining companies and prospectors began filing claims on the excised land within 24 hours of the July announcement, according to Backpacker and Courthouse News Service. Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told Backpacker those claims are invalid because they were filed before monument protections formally expire on September 11, and said SUWA will monitor for further claims after that date and challenge any actual mining or drilling activity.

Access Fund, which represents climbers, says the cuts stripped monument status from more than 80% of the Indian Creek climbing area, putting an estimated 1,200 climbing routes at risk of "noise, air, and visual pollution" or loss of access altogether, according to Climbing magazine. The new proclamation also doesn't recognize climbing as a protected activity across what remains of Bears Ears, a status Obama and Biden's versions had included.

Because the 2017 case never reached a ruling before Biden reversed the cuts, no federal court has ever actually decided whether a president has the legal authority to shrink or eliminate a national monument under the Antiquities Act. That question now heads back to the same D.C. district court that shelved it in 2021, with the same plaintiffs and a wider swath of land on the line.