As a steady stream of people marched through Yosemite National Park, homemade signs held high over their heads, they echoed a single unifying message: “Protect our parks.”
From the Grand Canyon to the Rocky Mountains to Yellowstone and beyond, thousands gathered at national parks across the country on Saturday to protest sweeping federal cuts to the United States’ historic public lands.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump’s administration fired around 2,000 recently hired employees at the U.S. Forest Service and slashed an additional 1,000 jobs at the National Park Service.
The mass terminations, part of an ongoing push to cut federal bureaucracy and spending, have raised concerns about the future of these lands. Affected national park and forest employees told NBC News that fewer workers will lead to longer lines, filthy bathrooms and unsafe hiking and camping conditions.
“We need to stop the nonsense,” John Goodwin, a now-retired longtime park service employee, told NBC Bay Area while protesting at Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco. “We need to hire back the people who were fired, not only at national parks but every federal employee who has lost their job in the last six weeks.”
Following initial backlash over the cuts, The Associated Press had reported that the administration would restore at least 50 jobs as well as hire nearly 3,000 additional seasonal workers.
Still, the discontent was visible leading up to Saturday’s nationwide protests. At Yosemite a week earlier, a group of laid-off park employees hung an American flag upside down at the summit of El Capitan, a famed 3,000-foot vertical rock formation.
An upside-down American flag is traditionally a sign of “dire distress,” according to the U.S. Flag Code.
On Saturday, protesters showed up at national parks large and small, spanning dozens of states from coast to coast.
“Public lands belong to all Americans, and federal agencies and federal employees work on behalf of the American people,” protester Peri Sasnett told NBC affiliate WJAR of Providence, Rhode Island, calling on the administration to “rehire illegally fired federal employees.”
She was demonstrating at the Roger Williams National Memorial, a 4.5-acre park in Providence.
And in Washington state, local resident Austin Woods was one of more than 50 people who gathered to protest at the Whitman Mission National Historic Site.
“Sometimes it feels like there’s not a whole lot that we can do in the current political environment,” he told NBC affiliate KNDU of Yakima, Washington. “But one thing that we can do is be present, be vocal and be passionate.”
Since taking office in January, Trump’s administration has executed mass firings across numerous sectors of government, targeting workers who were in probationary periods. This came after the administration attempted to offer buyouts to nearly all government employees and impose a hiring freeze for federal workers.
On Wednesday, a Trump administration memo directed federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs, noting that “Trump has required “large-scale reductions in force.” A day later, a federal judge ruled the memo was legally invalid and ordered that it be rescinded.
