Donald Trump offered Americans a dramatic justification for stripping federal protection from more than 1.2 million acres of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
People, he claimed, had effectively been locked out.
“You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t do anything—you can virtually not even walk on it,” Trump declared while announcing the massive rollback.
Deputy Interior Secretary Kate MacGregor immediately reinforced his account.
“That’s exactly right, sir,” she responded.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times reportedly reveal something extraordinary: Trump administration officials had been informed just weeks earlier that hiking, hunting, fishing and even motorized recreation were already permitted inside the monument.
The revelation strikes directly at one of the central arguments Trump used to justify reducing Bears Ears from approximately 1.36 million acres to just over 121,000—a cut of roughly 91 percent.
According to the records, Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office sent a briefing memo to a senior Interior Department adviser in June confirming that “current recreational access” existed throughout the protected landscape.
The memo reportedly described several well-known routes.
One provided off-road vehicles with “motorized access deep into the area.” Another was a backcountry corridor used by backpackers attempting a demanding 40-mile wilderness loop.
Those were not obscure exceptions hidden from federal officials.
They were specific examples of the public using the land in precisely the ways Trump claimed were virtually impossible.
The contradiction becomes even sharper when hunting and fishing are considered.
Utah authorities allow both activities within Bears Ears as long as visitors possess the required state licenses. Monument status did not create the blanket recreational prohibition Trump described.
Conservation advocates say that makes the president’s statement more than a harmless exaggeration.
Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told the Times that the documents indicated Trump was either “lying or spreading misinformation” about the land.
That distinction matters.
The records establish that the administration received information contradicting Trump’s public claim. They do not, by themselves, prove that Trump personally read the briefing or knowingly repeated something he understood to be false.
But they create a serious question about how such specific and easily verifiable information disappeared before the president addressed the country.
Louis Williams, founder of an Indigenous-led tour group operating around Bears Ears, expressed disbelief at Trump’s description.
Williams said the region is accessible and questioned whether the president had ever visited it or understood how residents, tourists and tribal communities actually use the landscape.
The administration’s own proclamation provides another revealing clue.
Rather than merely promising to restore recreational access, it opens excluded land to grazing, motorized use, logging and other forms of resource development. The White House framed the reduction as a correction to what it described as an excessively broad application of the Antiquities Act.
The official proclamation confirms that Bears Ears was reduced from approximately 1.36 million acres to around 121,100 acres. The White House published the full boundary modification on July 13.
That enormous change affects much more than where visitors may hike.
National monument status generally protects archaeological, cultural and natural resources while still allowing many recreational activities. Removing land from the monument can make it easier to pursue grazing, mining, drilling, road construction and other commercial development, depending on the applicable land-management rules.
Bears Ears is especially sensitive because it contains ancient cliff dwellings, burial grounds, petroglyphs and ceremonial sites sacred to several tribal nations.
The monument was established by Barack Obama in 2016 after years of advocacy by a coalition of Native American tribes.
Trump reduced it dramatically during his first term. Tribal and environmental groups sued, arguing that the Antiquities Act allows presidents to create monuments but does not authorize them to dismantle protections established by a predecessor.
That unresolved legal battle was interrupted when President Joe Biden restored the monument’s original boundaries in 2021.
Trump has now attempted the reduction again.
Reuters reported that the new proclamation opens excluded areas to expanded grazing, logging, motorized recreation and other resource development. Tribal and conservation organizations have already signaled another legal challenge.
The administration argues that the original monument was unnecessarily large and that local residents deserve greater control over nearby public lands.
That is a legitimate policy position that can be debated.
But it is not the argument Trump presented when he suggested ordinary Americans had been prohibited from walking, hunting or fishing there.
The documents reportedly show the opposite.
Trails were open. Backpackers were using them. Off-road vehicles could travel deep into the area. Licensed hunting and fishing continued under Utah law.
Even Biden’s restoration proclamation described Bears Ears as a destination for hunting, backpacking, climbing, rafting, mountain biking and other recreation.
The rollback may therefore have expanded opportunities for commercial exploitation, but it did not liberate a landscape from a total public-access ban—because no such ban existed.
Trump stood before the country and painted Bears Ears as a vast federal fortress where Americans could do virtually nothing.
His own government had already been handed a map of the roads, trails and recreational activities proving otherwise.
The administration used the story to remove protections from more than a million acres.
Now the paper trail is exposing just how fragile that story may have been.
