Earlier this month, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced new legislation to amend the Wilderness Act to allow for easier immigration enforcement on public lands in the United States’ border regions.
In his fact sheet for the legislation, called the “Border Lands Conservation Act,” Lee wrote that illegal immigration leads to environmental degradation in these areas, like trash buildup, wildfires started by undocumented immigrants, unauthorized trail building, and cattle and livestock escaping when people cut fences.
He wrote that his bill would provide “the needed authorities and steps to secure the border, conserve land that is ravaged by illegal immigration, and stop the environmental destruction caused by unlawful entry.”
But public lands and environmental advocates say the bill is an excuse to roll back protections for public lands under the guise of immigration enforcement.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 created the congressional designation of a “wilderness area.” Sometimes referred to as “capital-W Wilderness,” it’s the most stringent protection a landscape can have. A wide variety of activities are prohibited in wilderness areas, such as extractive activities like mining and drilling, motorized and mechanized travel, and road building.
Lee’s bill seeks to amend the landmark legislation, by allowing DHS to conduct a number of activities normally prohibited by the law, including building roads, fences, and other physical barriers, and using motorized vehicles.
This would apply to wilderness areas and public lands within 100 miles of both the northern and southern borders. It includes sites such as Joshua Tree National Park in California, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.
Neal Clark, the Wildlands Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said Lee’s bill is confusing, because there are existing avenues to address emergencies in wilderness areas.
“The Wilderness Act already allows for exceptions for things like motorized travel for emergencies and search and rescue,” he said. “But that requires working with the land managers in a way that ensures that impacts to public land resources are minimized. That’s the goal.”
Clark noted that there are already agreements between DHS and land management agencies for the agency to conduct operations. This bill, he said, gives carte blanche to DHS “to do whatever they want without having to do any coordination, and make any real efforts to try to conserve public lands, to protect public land resources.”
The Border Lands Conservation Act would also require agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to assist with that infrastructure buildout, which Clark said takes authority away from the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture to make decisions about the lands they’re meant to be managing.
Olivia Juarez, the public lands program director for the nonprofit advocacy group GreenLatinos, questioned whether Lee was actually concerned about “America’s crown jewels,” as he referred to them in his press release.
“If Senator Lee was really concerned about managing litter and invasive species and other vegetation or fires, he would be on the front of allowing public lands to be restored rather than extracted, allowing the ocean to exist as sanctuaries for wildlife rather than drilling sites for oil,” they said. “He would've delivered a huge budget for public land agencies to address the deferred maintenance backlog.”
Clark agreed, saying Lee should be “working tirelessly” to increase funding for chronically understaffed and underfunded land management agencies like the Forest Service and BLM.
“This is something he has literally never done in the course of his career,” Clark said.
This summer, Lee sponsored a bill as part of the budget reconciliation process that would have sold off millions of acres of public lands for housing, which sparked widespread and bipartisan backlash.
“The Trump administration is villainizing immigrants for all of our national problems in order to substantiate varying levels of privatization on our public lands,” Juarez said.
They also pointed out that the bill includes provisions for "tactical infrastructure,” or surveillance technology, including “observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, vehicle barriers, fences, roads, bridges, drainage, and detection devices.”
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can profile based on race as grounds for immigration stops. Juarez said in this new regime, increased surveillance on public lands will disproportionately impact people that aren’t white and English-speaking.
“When we're there, are we safe?” they asked. “And the militarization of public lands, the installation of surveillance technologies, undermines the component of being able to feel safe on public land.”
“It's going to make (public lands) more dangerous for everybody, especially more dangerous for Black and brown individuals,” they added.
Lee’s office has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
