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SALT LAKE CITY — <\/span>Revisiting actions from his first term that were reversed, President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will scale back the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante<\/a> national monuments in Utah.<\/p>\n The Republican\u2019s actions undo proclamations<\/a> from his predecessors who deemed the sites worthy of preservation under the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that gives presidents power to protect areas of cultural, historic or scientific interest.<\/p>\n Trump made similar moves during his first term, but many were reversed<\/a> by his successor, President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n The back-and-forth<\/a> underscores how national monuments have become a flashpoint over the management of public lands. Trump is not the first president to reduce the size of monuments.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a look at U.S. national monuments and presidents who have created or reshaped them:<\/p>\n Trump made only a handful of Antiquities Act proclamations during his first term, including two that reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments. The sprawling Utah monuments include stunning natural features and sites sacred to some Native American tribes. Grand Staircase-Escalante also holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium.<\/p>\n Trump also dedicated the 340-acre (138-hectare) Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky \u2014 a Union Army hospital and recruiting center for African American troops during the Civil War.<\/p>\n Biden\u2019s first use of the act was to restore the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante<\/a>. He cited their spiritual, cultural and prehistoric legacy.<\/p>\n Biden established 10 new monuments, among them the site of a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois,<\/a> and a monument honoring Mamie Till-Mobley and her son, Emmett,<\/a> a Black teenager from Chicago who was tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. He also established monuments in the mountains of California and on a sacred Native American site near the Grand Canyon.<\/p>\n Proponents of the reductions say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for essential minerals. Trump framed the move as giving back land to the people during a signing event at the White House on Monday. <\/p>\n The order was applauded by Utah officials<\/a>, who have long argued that the state should be in charge of managing its own lands.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question has never been whether to protect them, but how to protect them best,\u201d said Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican. His office assured the lands left out of the modified boundaries \u201cremain protected under existing federal and state law.”<\/p>\n But some conservationists and citizens of local tribal nations warned the order opens the door to mining interests while disrespecting tribal co-stewardship. Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.<\/p>\n \u201cOur connection to this place cannot be erased by the stroke of a pen,\u201d said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.<\/p>\n Environmental groups have argued the Antiquities Act is a one-way road that allows presidents to create but not undo monuments. But there\u2019s a history of presidents taking actions similar to Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n