More than 5,000 people rallied on the steps of the Utah State Capitol on Saturday afternoon to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s expected shrinking of two national monument areas in the state. Trump is expected to visit Utah on Monday and announce cutting the size of Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where drilling and mining are banned. Bears Ears is planned to be cut by 85 percent to 201,397 acres and Grand-Escalante to be halved to 997,490 acres. Trump has argued previous administrations abused their right to designate monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 and put millions of acres, mainly in western states, off limits to drilling, mining, logging and ranching without adequate input from locals. There was no sign of counter-protesters supporting Trump on the monuments issue on Saturday in Salt Lake City.
