US national parks: 15 rumors we've investigated

Attention shifted to U.S. national parks in summer 2026 as claims spread across social media that the administration of President Donald Trump was making incursions into historically protected land. Federal protection of the parks went hand in hand with the U.S. military's forcible removals of Indigenous communities from the land — codifying the idea of a pristine, unpopulated wilderness popularized by naturalist John Muir. As the Trump administration tests the legal limits of environmental preservation, below are 15 claims we've fact-checked about U.S. national parks. Sources Kantor, Isaac. 'Ethnic Cleansing and America's Creation of National Parks '. 28 Pub. Land & Resources L. Rev. 41 (2007) , June 2007, https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1267&context=plrlr.New item…Legal and Policy Mandates (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/legal-and-policy-mandates.htm. Accessed 29 Sept. 2026.Melley, Brian. 'Sierra Club Apologizes for Founder John Muir's Racist Views'. AP News, 22 July 2020, https://apnews.com/article/c52ccd3ac1c127289cf5b1a5c0dc070d. By Taija PerryCook Taija PerryCook is a Seattle-based journalist who previously worked for the PNW news site Crosscut and the Jordan Times in Amman. Article Tags