Supreme Court allows barriers, patrol roads and surveillance systems in Big Bend

Three plaintiffs challenge plans affecting park, church and border property

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to proceed with plans for 30-foot-tall steel barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park. The administration plans to construct hundreds of miles of border barrier and security infrastructure in west Texas.

A federal judge in El Paso issued the temporary injunction that halted construction of the 30-foot-tall steel barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure. The unsigned five-page decision issued Monday said the judge who ordered the work stopped lacked authority to weigh in, while a court hearing over the effort continues.

Three plaintiffs brought the lawsuit: the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group; an area nonprofit working to preserve a historic church near the U.S.-Mexico border; and a landowner who stands to lose his border property. The lawsuit argues that the Department of Homeland Security’s plans are unconstitutional and that Big Bend residents would be “irreparably harmed” if construction continues.

“This decision greenlights the contractors and allows the bulldozers to come roaring back into the region,” said Laiken Jordahl with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It allows the dynamiting of national park canyon walls, the bulldozing of pristine desert.”

“The injunction thus impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity,” reads the unsigned decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter.

The court wrote that federal law allows Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to waive environmental protections and conservation laws, which they called a “clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms respondents assert.”

In an emergency application to the high court in late October, the federal government urged the justices to intervene and allow the work to begin again. The application said a gap in “border defenses” in the Big Bend region would “act as a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors.”

Solicitor General John Sauer called the injunction “baseless” and “unprecedented,” and said any pocket of the Big Bend without a barrier would “become a funnel point for illegal alien crossings that are thwarted by barriers elsewhere.”

The plans have drawn opposition across political lines because they include Big Bend National Park, a stretch of public land. People across the political spectrum say a wall is not needed in the Big Bend, a region known for its sweeping canyons, tough terrain and unforgiving desert heat. They worry about the threats a wall or any other kind of infrastructure poses to the environment and Indigenous sites, the tourism-based economy and wild animals.

Historically, the Big Bend area’s rugged landscape has meant fewer people attempting to cross into the U.S. through this pocket of the border. The Big Bend Sector, a nearly 500-mile stretch covered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, makes up over a quarter of the U.S.-Mexico border, yet regularly sees the fewest number of encounters along the Texas border, according to CBP data.