Washington • A group of Democratic senators are demanding Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke explain how a Canadian mining company has snatched up a dozen mining claims inside the former boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Such actions aren’t permitted, they argue, because President Donald Trump didn’t have the authority to shrink the monument in the first place — an assertion at the heart of an ongoing court battle.
“New mining within the boundaries of a national monument is illegal,” the senators, including Tom Udall and 22 fellow Democrats, wrote in a letter to Zinke this week, “and we believe these claims are as invalid as the president’s proclamation which is the subject of litigation.