New Mexico Indigenous and federal officials urge outcry on proposed rollback of Chaco protections

As a chorus of Indigenous leaders and politicians spoke at Wednesday’s event, they urged New Mexicans to submit a public comment on the BLM plan through its online portal.

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“Chaco is not a museum…it is a living cultural landscape,” Sanchez said Wednesday. “The pueblos have protected Chaco for thousands of years, and we’re not going to stop today.”

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) joined Sanchez in Washington, D.C., Wednesday and said that Chaco Canyon “is not for sale.” 

New Mexico has already positioned itself as a national leader in oil and gas production, and it’s done so without sacrificing sacred sites, Heinrich, who serves as ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said.

“We produce far more electrons than we consume and we have never had to sacrifice our most sacred places to do that,” he said. “And we should not do that going forward.”

Each of New Mexico’s U.S. senators and representatives, all Democrats, spoke out against the proposal at Wednesday’s event and said it was an “insult” that the federal government would allow just two weeks for public comment on a plan that could undo years of work to install Chaco’s current protections. In 2025, they proposed legislation that would make those protections permanent.

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) questioned whether it’s necessary to drill any closer to Chaco than what is currently allowed. The BLM’s current proposal lists three options: eliminate the 10-mile buffer zone; cut it in half; or keep it intact.

Chaco sits in northwest New Mexico, near the Navajo Nation and the Four Corners region. About 1,000 years ago, it was the San Juan Basin’s cultural and economic hub, according to the U.S. National Park Service.

“A molecule of gas from Chaco is the same as a molecule of gas outside that 10-mile buffer zone,” Leger Fernández said. “That molecule of gas could be easily, easily developed outside and without disturbing the 4,700…archaeological sites within that 10 miles. If we let the bulldozers of the oil and gas companies destroy any of those 4,700 sites, they can never be reconstructed.”

State leaders push back on BLM plan

State lawmakers have also taken up the fight against the BLM’s plan. Rep. Derrick J. Lente (D-Sandia Pueblo) on Tuesday called on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and several state agencies to present a unified front against the federal plan.

“Chaco is not a bargaining chip, and it is not an ordinary parcel of federal land. It is the ancestral home of our people and a place of continuing ceremony and prayer,” Lente said in a statement. “As a Pueblo person and as a legislator, I refuse to stay quiet while our tribal sovereignty is ignored and our sacred lands are opened to extraction.”

In a statement to Source NM, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham wrote that she is “fiercely opposed” to the Trump administration’s proposal and noted that state Cultural Affairs Secretary Debra Garcia y Griego wrote a letter to BLM officials, urging them to keep the current protections in place.

The governor “is working through appropriate channels to push back on this terribly shortsighted and reckless plan, including submitting official administration correspondence in opposition back in April and communicating with New Mexico’s congressional delegation,” Lujan Grisham’s Communications Director Michael Coleman wrote in an email to Source NM. “She encourages Rep. Lente, other members of the New Mexico Legislature and the general public to also submit letters in opposition to help protect Chaco Canyon.”