A week after the White House indicated it would eliminate two national monuments in California, many remain unsure whether President Trump has actually revoked the lands’ protected status.
Mr. Trump announced last Friday that he would rescind a proclamation signed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. a week before he left office that established the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments, which encompassed more than 848,000 acres of desert and mountainous land.
The White House then released a fact sheet that included a bullet point stating that Mr. Trump would be “terminating proclamations” declaring monuments that safeguarded “vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.”
The New York Times confirmed last Saturday that Mr. Trump had indeed rescinded that proclamation. But later that day, the bullet point listing termination of national monuments disappeared from the White House fact sheet.
A post on X sent by a verified White House account last week still included the terminations of national monuments, and has not been edited or removed as of Saturday morning.
The White House declined to answer questions about the discrepancy.
“We were obviously very disappointed to see that fact sheet go up and then confused to see it come back down,” Mark Green, the executive director of CalWild, a nonprofit in California that advocates for wild spaces on public lands. “There’s very little clarity about what’s going on, and there’s such a lack of transparency with this administration that it’s just really hard to know what’s happening.”
Representative Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California, said his office was working to understand what was happening. He helped push for the creation of the Chuckwalla National Monument within his district.
“One thing is for sure,” Dr. Ruiz said. “If the designation is rescinded, we’re going to fight like hell to defend it.”
Mr. Biden designated the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments in January to protect wildlife habitats and ancestral lands, and to help prevent mining, drilling and energy development.
The Chuckwalla National Monument encompasses about 644,000 acres south of Joshua Tree National Park, and the Sáttítla National Monument north of Mount Shasta, near the Oregon border, is roughly 200,000 acres. The land includes mountain ranges, canyons, desert landscapes, and more than 50 rare species of plants and animals.
State lawmakers, conservationists, renewable energy companies and Native tribes had jointly advocated for the protection of the land.
Mr. Biden protected about 674 million acres of federal land, more than any other president. He was able to do so by using the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that gives presidents unilateral power to protect lands and waters for the benefit of Americans.
But Mr. Trump said he would undo much of Mr. Biden’s environmental work when he was sworn into office — withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and ending climate regulations, to start — and in early January he said that he wouldn’t tolerate the withdrawal of waters from oil and gas drilling.
“I will reverse it immediately,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be done immediately and we will drill, baby, drill.”
The question is whether Mr. Trump has the authority to reverse the creation of a national monument that was created by a previous president.
During his first term, Mr. Trump shrunk the size of two national monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah — by some two million acres. A lawsuit was filed arguing the Antiquities Act did not grant a president the power to reduce a national park, but the case was moot after Biden re-established and slightly expanded the national monuments.
Mr. Green is confident that rescinding Mr. Biden’s proclamations could place Mr. Trump in court.
“We believe that these monuments exist in a legal sense, and that there’s nothing the Trump administration will be able to do about that short of violating the law,” Mr. Green said.