SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
October, 07 2021, 10:26pm EDT
Contact:
Steve Blackledge, Senior Conservation Program Director, sblackledge@
Kelsey Lamp, Protect Our Oceans Campaign Director, klamp@environmentamerica.org
Josh Chetwynd, Deputy Director, Media Relations, jchetwynd@
Statement: Biden honors U.S. conservation legacy by restoring protections for Utah, New England monuments
Great day for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts
WASHINGTON
President Joe Biden is expected to restore protections Friday for three national monuments. The original boundaries for two Utah areas, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and the original protections for the U.S. Atlantic's only marine monument, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, will be reinstated after being stripped during the Trump administration.
This Trump administration shrank the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument boundaries nearly in half. This left such endangered species as the Mexican spotted owl and the Southwestern willow flycatcher, who call these areas home, at great risk. Along with protecting the natural beauty and species who live in these areas, more than 100,000 archaeologically significant objects, including grave sites, ceremonial grounds and ancient cliff dwellings, which were at risk from oil drilling and mining, will be safeguarded.
The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which received safeguards in 2016 during the Obama administration, saw its protections rolled back in 2020 as President Donald Trump lifted restrictions on commercial fishing within the monument's boundaries. Environment America highlighted restoring the marine monument in First Things to Fix, a list of Trump-era rollbacks that the Biden administration should reverse to protect our land, air, water and climate.
Following President Biden's executive action, the area, which is home to dozens of species of deep sea coral and is an important habitat for whales and other marine mammals, will once again be set to become an entanglement-free zone in the Atlantic Ocean's U.S. boundaries. This decision will also ensure that the marine monument serves as a refuge for species vulnerable to climate change impacts and as a research area to allow for a better understanding of deep sea ocean ecosystems.
In response, Steve Blackledge, Environment America's senior conservation program director, issued the following statement:
"Our country has a long history of ensuring 'America the Beautiful' exists for generations to come. By restoring safeguards to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, we can rest assured that these treasured areas will remain a part of that lasting legacy. Because all three of these monuments protect biodiversity and critical habitat, this victory will help the U.S. move closer to protecting 30 percent of our important lands and waters.
"There are so many reasons to rejoice over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante once again receiving protection. They are home to countless animals, such as eagles, owls and a world-renowned elk population. Visitors come from all over for beautiful hikes, rock climbing, river rafting and wildlife viewing. They are also rich cultural heritage sites and are sacred to many Native Americans who originally lobbied for federal recognition.
"The same is true for New England's Northeast Canyons and Seamounts. This majestic underwater landscape teems with both large and small life. From whales and dolphins to thousand-year-old deep sea coral, this is a biodiversity hotspot, one that deserves protection in perpetuity. We are so glad to see the president safeguard this diverse and important ecosystem at the edge of the continental shelf."
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
(303) 801-0581LATEST NEWS
From Maine to Minnesota and Beyond, Tens of Thousands March to Demand 'ICE Out!'
"We want to show solidarity," said one employee at a worker-owned bakery in Los Angeles. "We've seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities."
Jan 30, 2026
Popular outrage over President Donald Trump's deadly campaign targeting immigrants and their defenders sparked a National Shutdown day of protests across the United States on Friday, as people from coast to coast took to the streets demanding an end to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "reign of terror."
"No school, no work, and no shopping," the National Shutdown said on its website. "The entire country is shocked and outraged at the brutal killings of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Keith Porter Jr. by federal agents."
"While Trump and other right-wing politicians are slandering them as 'terrorists,' the video evidence makes it clear beyond all doubt: They were gunned down in broad daylight simply for exercising their First Amendment right to protest mass deportation," the campaign continued.
"Every day, ICE, Border Patrol, and other enforcers of Trump’s racist agenda are going into our communities to kidnap our neighbors and sow fear," the protest organizers added. "It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough!"
BREAKING: For the second week in a row Minneapolis came out in full force for the nationwide shutdown demanding ICE out of everywhere. pic.twitter.com/bOnN8nWEI4
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) January 30, 2026
One week after an estimated 50,000 protesters marched in downtown Minneapolis for the "ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom" rally, at least tens of thousands of people braved subzero wind chill temperatures to protest the ongoing Operation Metro Surge blitz in the Twin Cities.
Rock icon Bruce Springsteen—who this week released a song called “Streets of Minneapolis" to pay tribute to activists fighting Trump's assault on immigrants and American democracy—made a surprise appearance at a benefit concert for the families of Good and Pretti.
Maine Public Radio reported that over 150 businesses, mostly in the Portland area, closed their doors Friday amid Operation Catch of the Day, during which ICE enforcers have arrested hundreds of people in the Pine Tree State.
"Today, the working class of Portland has sent a clear message to those in power: Your power is derived from our labor, and we are not afraid to withhold our labor for the safety of our neighbors," South Portland retail worker Keeli Parker told MPR.
In Chicago—where ICE's Operation Midway Blitz prompted a special commission appointed by Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to recommend the prosecution of federal agents who violate people's constitutional rights—Nick Mayor, co-owner of Brewed Coffee in the Avondale neighborhood, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the cost of closing his business for the day "pales in comparison to the cost of what is happening to other people and their families, with their lives getting taken and torn apart.”
More than 1,000 people packed into Washington Square in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, where protesters chanted slogans including “Power to the people, no one is illegal,” and, “No justice, no peace, we want ICE off our streets!”
Three hundred miles southwest of Salt Lake City in St. George, Utah, dozens of demonstrators rallied in the city center, holding signs reading, "ICE Out" and "the wrong ICE is melting." One disapproving motorist yelled, "Go back to California" while driving by, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
In Los Angeles, Proof Bakery, a worker-owned cooperative in Atwater Village, also shut its doors for the day.
"We want to show solidarity," Proof Bakery worker-owner Daniela Diaz told KABC. "We've seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities."
Incredible scene at Brown University as thousands of schools across the country stage walkouts to protest ICE’s reign of terror.History will remember who stood up and who stayed silent against state sanctioned murder.
[image or embed]
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 11:26 AM
Hundreds of high school students walked out of their classrooms in Asheville, North Carolina, where sophomore Henry Pope told the Mountain XPress, “We reject the ICE terror that’s sweeping across our communities."
“We reject everything this far-right, billionaire administration stands for, and we need justice to be brought to Jonathan Ross and every other killer ICE agent in this country," Pope added, referring to the officer who fatally shot Good earlier this month.
Kelia Harold, a senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville, rallied on campus with around 100 other students.
“Instead of sitting on my own and being helpless, it really helps to come out here,” she told the New York Times, noting Pretti's killing.
“If that could happen to him," she said, "I don’t see why it couldn’t happen to anyone else.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Rights Groups Warn Trump DOJ Is 'Trying to Scare Journalists' With Lemon, Fort Arrests
“The arrests today of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering an anti-ICE protest are a blatant attempt to intimidate others from covering criticism of the administration and its policies," said an Amnesty International official.
Jan 30, 2026
The arrests of two US journalists on Friday over their reporting on a protest at a church in Saint Paul earlier this month sent shockwaves through rights organizations that have long defended reporters around the world from similarly blatant attacks on press freedom.
"The Trump administration cannot send federal agents after reporters simply because they don't like the stories being reported," said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, now an independent journalist, and Georgia Fort, an independent reporter based in Minnesota, reported on and filmed a protest organized by local residents on January 18 against a pastor at a church who was also reported to be working as a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.
On Friday morning, federal law enforcement agents took the two journalists into custody, accusing them of a "coordinated attack on Cities Church." The Department of Homeland Security said Lemon was being charged with conspiracy and interfering with the First Amendment rights of worshippers, and cited the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—a law that prohibits intimidating or using force against people who try to access reproductive health services but also contains provisions covering places of worship.
Local political candidates Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy were also arrested over the protest. Fort was released Friday afternoon.
"I should be protected under the First Amendment," she said upon her release. "I've been advocating for mainstream media journalists who have been brutalized for months. Do we have a Constitution? That is the pressing question that should be on the front of everyone's minds."
Shortly after Georgia Fort's release from federal custody, law enforcement in riot gear cleared out the 1st floor of the US District courthouse in downtown #Mpls, forcing everyone outside. The independent journalist spoke to reporters there. Here is a clip @FOX9 pic.twitter.com/VsAmClM3YY
— Paul Blume (@PaulBlume_FOX9) January 30, 2026
Weimers emphasized that federal authorities had previously filed a criminal complaint against Lemon over the protest, but it was rejected by a federal magistrate judge, which "enraged" Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“Time and time again we are seeing the Trump administration clamping down on free speech rather than upholding human rights. Black and Brown journalists have been particularly targeted for exercising their rights to freedom of expression."
Amnesty International USA also emphasized that the arrests were not just attacks on Lemon's and Fort's rights, but also "a critical threat to our human rights.”
“US authorities must immediately release journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, said Tarah Demant. "Journalism is not a crime. Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice."
“The arrests today of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering an anti-ICE protest are a blatant attempt to intimidate others from covering criticism of the administration and its policies," Demant said, noting that the arrests came as top Trump administration officials and agents on the ground have made clear the White House views people who film ICE agents—an action that is broadly protected by the First Amendment—are "domestic terrorists."
“Time and time again we are seeing the Trump administration clamping down on free speech rather than upholding human rights," she said. "Black and Brown journalists have been particularly targeted for exercising their rights to freedom of expression."
Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent, noted that "journalists have an important role to play in covering protests" like the ones that have been taking place in Minneapolis and all over the country against Trump's deployment of federal immigration agents to detain and deport immigrants and US citizens alike, the majority of whom have had no criminal backgrounds despite the president's claim that the operation is targeting "the worst of the worst."
"Social movements are often vital parts of our nation’s history and it is essential that they be documented in real time," said Gibbons. "By covering the protesters and their message, journalists help to inform our public debates, helping Americans get vital information about sides of an issue that otherwise go ignored."
"It is for precisely this reason that we have repeatedly seen journalists covering protests across the United States being subject to brutality, false arrests, and bogus charges," he added. "The arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are clearly part of that shameful practice... Abusing the legal process to stage retaliatory arrests of a journalist is an attack on our democracy. We call on the charges to be dropped and any public officials involved with pushing them to resign from office immediately."
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law president Damon T. Hewitt also noted that "targeting two acclaimed Black independent journalists for criminal prosecution sends a chilling message at a moment when independent Black media is more necessary than ever."
"Freedom of the press is not optional—it is foundational to a thriving multiracial democracy and is a vital constraint on government overreach," said Hewitt. "This is not just stifling dissent—it’s chilling speech and stifling basic access to information and facts, targeting viewpoints the administration dislikes, and retaliating against law firms, universities, nonprofit organizations, and now reporters who value truth, equality, and justice. This is authoritarianism. And it must not stand.”
Emily Peterson-Cassin, policy director for Demand Progress, said the Trump administration was "trying to scare journalists away from covering the events in Minnesota" by arresting Lemon and Fort.
"The Trump administration, she said, "is clearly waging an ongoing, unconstitutional campaign to intimidate a free and fearless press into submission and must be held accountable.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Senate GOP Rejects Sanders Amendment to Give ICE's Extra $75 Billion to Medicaid
"Instead of funding a domestic army which breaks the Constitution every day, we should be putting that money to help the people of our country get the healthcare that they need," said the progressive senator.
Jan 30, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders' amendment to repeal a $75 billion funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and direct that money toward Medicaid "to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the healthcare they desperately need" was rejected by a slim majority of his colleagues on Friday.
The amendment—which failed 49-51—is one of seven Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) agreed to allow votes on before senators moved to an appropriations bill to avert another full-blown federal government shutdown, which passed 71-29. Although the White House is preparing for a shutdown because funding lapses at midnight, the House of Representatives is expected to send the spending bill to President Donald Trump's desk on Monday.
Sanders' (I-Vt.) amendment targeted $75 billion in ICE funding included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget package that congressional Republicans and Trump imposed last summer. In addition to giving a bunch of extra money to an agency that's violently raiding US cities as part of the president's mass deportation agenda, the OBBBA gave more tax cuts to the ultrarich while slashing social safety net programs such as Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income Americans.
"This country, under President Trump, every single day, is moving closer and closer toward an authoritarian society where we have a reckless and unbalanced president who wants more and more power in his own hands," Sanders said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, citing the Republican leader's contempt for Congress, the courts, the media, and more.
"And now, on top of all of that, what we are seeing is that one our great American cities—Minneapolis, Minnesota—is essentially being occupied by ICE," he continued. "What's going on in Minneapolis and has gone on in other cities is not what this country is about."
Sanders argued that "we do not want or need, and must never allow, federal agents—people paid by federal tax dollars—with masks on their face, knocking down doors; ignoring the Constitution; grabbing people; putting them into unmarked vans; taking 5-year-olds away from their parents; putting them in detention centers; shooting American citizens in cold blood."
In Minneapolis in recent weeks, ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good; an immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan man named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg; and two members of Customs and Border Protection fatally shot Alex Pretti. Meanwhile, Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy abducted by immigration agents in the city and sent with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, is now in poor health, according to his family.
ICE's actions in Minnesota and beyond have fueled calls for Congress to cut funding for or even abolish the agency—and the debate over Department of Homeland Security appropriations has delayed the broader spending package, leading to the looming but seemingly short-term government shutdown.
"What ICE has become is not an agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, what it has become is Trump's domestic army," Sanders said. "And I would hope that my conservative friends—people who year after year get up here and say: 'We believe in small government. Get the government off our backs. Let local communities make their own decision.'—finally stand up and say that in America, we do not need a domestic army terrorizing communities throughout this country."
"Instead of funding a domestic army which breaks the Constitution every day, we should be putting that money to help the people of our country get the healthcare that they need," declared the senator, a leading advocate of Medicare for All.
While the vote on Sanders' amendment was mostly along party lines—only Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) sided with the chamber's Democrats and both Independents—many Democrats joined most of the GOP in voting for the broader appropriations bills.
Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, was among the two dozen Democratic senators and four Republicans who voted against the package. He said that "I could not, in good conscience, vote for the federal funding deal," noting that "I promised the people of Vermont that I would not support another penny for ICE unless there were fundamental reforms to how that agency operates."
"While I voted against this bill because of the disastrous situation with ICE, it does include a number of important provisions that I successfully fought for," he highlighted. "As the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Senate, I am proud that this legislation includes the largest increase in mandatory funding for community health centers in a decade, begins to address the massive shortage of doctors in America, takes on the greed of pharmacy benefit managers, makes it easier for the American people to receive low-cost generic drugs and expands pediatric cancer research."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular