No bulldozing Big Bend!
Take action here: chilli ‒ power, in your hand Bulldozers broke ground inside Big Bend National Park last week, right along the Rio Grande with Santa Elena Canyon in the background. The plan is about 200 miles of patrol roads, 17 miles of vehicle barriers, and surveillance technology, paid for with a $1.7 billion contract to a private construction company. Here is what makes this so hard to accept. Inside the park, apprehensions accounted for less than one tenth of one percent of the national total. This is not a place where people are crossing. The Border Patrol and the Park Service have worked side by side out there for decades without carving roads through the wildest country left in Texas. More than 500,000 people visit Big Bend every year. The park brought almost $57 million into that local economy in 2024. The river outfitters in Terlingua are the ones who lose when public access to the Rio Grande gets cut off. That is a real economy with real jobs, and it disappears the moment the bulldozers finish. The opposition here is not partisan. A Republican senator, the Texas land commissioner, border sheriffs, county judges, and private landowners have all raised concerns. The land commissioner sent a cease and desist for clearing state land without permission.
Caroline Gleich
"We didn't have to worry about any type of barrier. We had a God-made barrier," said Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland of Terrell County, a vast and sparsely populated area northeast of the park. He spent 26 years in the US Border Patrol, hearing little if any talk of needing extra infrastructure in the area where he grew up, he said. "But that's definitely changed."
US Customs and Border Protection says it's not planning to build the same kind of 30-foot-high barrier that has appeared across parts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas inside the national park. But critics say the plan that is in the works is no less destructive.
Earlier this month, bulldozers were videoed uprooting trees and shoveling dirt as wild animals trotted by. They were doing preliminary work ahead of the budgeted $1.72 billion main construction project designated for the area inside Big Bend National Park, the agency said.
It's part of the bigger plan to finish the border wall — or some form of it — before Trump leaves office, with steel walls and vehicle barriers and hundreds of miles of new roads cutting through wildly remote areas.
Those with concerns or outright opposition to the work in this remote desert wilderness run the gamut from a few elected Republicans to young activists, sweeping in a pro-border control sheriff and a retired National Park Service superintendent.
Photographer Natalie Newman made a commitment to Big Bend back in February when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem waived certain federal laws related to environmental safety, historic preservation and wildlife protection, among other initiatives, saying there was "an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers and roads" in the Big Bend region.
"It started out as just documenting the beauty of it, trying to get people to see why it's special and what makes it special and what makes it so beautiful and worth protecting. But that has transformed just over the last week," she told CNN, standing near Santa Elena Canyon, where tall cliffs rise nearly 1,500 feet high from the Rio Grande and where she first saw bulldozers working in the national park.
"More than anything else, I feel heartbreak over all of this," she said. Newman enjoys the wilder parts of this park that's larger than the state of Rhode Island, where you may see fewer people than javelinas — a mammal that looks like a small wild pig, though it's an entirely different species. Cacti and wildflowers bloom across the state and federal land around Big Bend, which coupled with even larger nature preserves across the border are part of the Chihuahuan desert, the largest such ecosystem in North America.