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‘A crazed road-building spree': Bipartisan Texans slam Big Bend border construction
Дата публикации: 12-08-2026 13:27:53
Some of the most pristine Texas land, full of centuries of history and a bounty of biodiversity, is beginning to feel the full weight of a two-decade-old border security law the Trump administration is wielding with force.
The Trump administration sent bulldozers and other equipment into Big Bend National Park last week to build roads and possibly some vehicle barriers in a very remote stretch of the border that opponents say gets very few illegal immigration crossings because of sheer cliffs on the U.S. and Mexico sides and other rugged and hostile terrain.
Using the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to secure the border through barriers and technology, the Trump administration waived more than two dozen laws to launch the construction. The Federal Register notice in May allows the Department of Homeland Security to waive all federal, state, and local laws to build a border “fence” as quickly as it needs.
The intrusion of the heavy equipment into the desert landscape where only the hardy dare to hike or paddle watercraft on the Rio Grande has set off alarms among folks in nearby communities happy for the vast stretches of land, the star-drenched night skies, the soothing quiet and the occasional pockets of no cellphone service that lie between them and the politics of Washington.
Videos of a work crew pulling trees and brush as they bladed a road through parkland were posted last week. Santa Elena Canyon, with sheer cliffs that rise to 1,500 feet, can be seen in the backgrounds of some videos. Similar cliffs are also found on the Mexican side of the border, creating the canyon.
Locals say that Customs and Border Protection and DHS have said the road is an access road and that there are no plans for a wall at Santa Elena Canyon.
“But having an additional road, I don’t see it providing any other type of assistance for border security,” Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland said.
Cleveland is a 26-year veteran of the Border Patrol, with 11 years as agent in charge at the Sanderson Border Patrol station, and he is a Republican. He said there is little to no illegal immigration activity where the construction work for the road is going on and in other places where border barriers and walls are planned.
Altogether, he said, Cleveland has 15 years on the border, and in that time, Border Patrol leadership in the area had no plans for permanent structures in the area that is known as the Big Bend sector, except in a few areas where a car can drive across a river bend.
“What we planned for is technology and manpower,” he said.
Cleveland is one of the five sheriffs responsible for law enforcement in the counties of the Big Bend border region who signed a letter in March opposing a border wall in the region, which includes the national park, a state park, and land stretching across their five counties.
“Based on decades of combined experience working this terrain, we believe that construction of a continuous physical border wall in the Big Bend region would not represent the most practical or strategic approach to border security in this area,” the letter says.
Cleveland said the billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on roads and other construction could be better spent on more autonomous surveillance towers, which include cameras and radar units atop 20-foot-high towers and use AI to monitor human movement. They cost about $1 million apiece. He also said drones like those used in Afghanistan are “what works best.”
Exactly what is planned and what land, public or private, it might intrude on have been hard to pin down. Locals and leaders have complained that what officials posted or publicized is not necessarily what is intended.
Customs and Border Protection said in an emailed statement that it is using money provided in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to construct a smart wall that is designed based on “operational requirements” provided by the Border Patrol with both deterrence and “access and mobility required to secure the border” in mind.
The agency said that construction has not started in Big Bend National Park but that construction crews were “onsite re-grading roads that were damaged by recent storms that are required for access to conduct surveys.”
The contractor is “cleaning out areas to support the design and survey phase, ahead of the start of construction activities,” CBP said.
“CBP is not planning to construct [a] 30-foot-high barrier in Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. CBP is planning for approximately 200 miles of patrol roads and detection technology along with approximately 17 miles of non-contiguous areas of vehicle barriers in strategic locations,” the agency said.
In this area where tax-and-spend isn’t easily swallowed, there is a rumble of discontent about what some see as off-the-mark border security spending.
“You know they’ve claimed no quote-unquote wall through the park, but it’s also clear they’re on a crazed road-building spree, because you know it’s a way to spend money and make money. It’s not that these roads are needed,” said Susan Hays, a Democrat who is running unopposed for the county commission in Presidio County, which borders Brewster County, where the national park is located.
Part of the reason people go to Big Bend National Park, an 801,163-acre park established in 1935 and deeded in 1944, is “to go on rough ranch roads on their four-wheel-drive vehicles and get to places where nobody else can get for the solitude,” Hays said. “And they are destroying that.”
Fossils and petroglyphs — and the remnants of a dark period in Texas history
The park, which includes the Chisos Mountains, has remote hot springs, panoramic canyons, fossils and ancient petroglyphs, to name a few of its highlights. It is home to at least 450 bird species, including the Colima warbler and the Lucifer hummingbird, as well as a good variety of flora and other fauna.
It is also loaded with history and outdoor recreation that provides livelihoods for outfitters and others.
The foliage that is being rolled over by a bulldozer in the video of the road construction looks like brush to a lot of people, but “those are some of the only trees in the desert of the park. That’s where migratory birds roost and get some water,” Hays said.
Jerry Patterson, former head of the Texas General Land Office, was driving out to the region when NBC News reached him Monday. He worked on a 2017 documentary about the Porvenir Massacre, the 1918 execution of 15 men and boys, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, by the Texas Rangers. Descendants of those who were killed, as well as historians, cite the importance of preserving the site as part of Texas history — and an example of the type of sanctioned killings and lynchings of Mexican Americans and Mexicans that took place in the American Southwest.
The massacre site is in the location where the road work was being done, said Patterson, who is a Republican. He was on his way to find out what of the historical area remains intact.
“We are still learning stuff, but we now won’t be able to because the contractor and CBP have bulldozed the site of the massacre,” Patterson said, adding that the site is on private property.
“They are not respecting private property and state property,” he said, noting a recent cease-and-desist letter State Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham sent to a contractor over its work on state land in Presidio County.
The land is leased for grazing, which raises revenue for the Texas school fund.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn has added his voice in support of local and state residents, asking DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a letter to meet with the Texas border sheriffs, county judges and private landowners who have raised “significant concerns” about planned construction in the region.
The Secure Fence Act allows DHS to consider alternatives to physical barriers and requires consulting with local governments, Indian tribes and property owners to minimize impact, which DHS has done in the past, Cornyn wrote in the Aug. 7 letter.
“I would ask that you or your designees meet with Texas stakeholders directly to discuss their concerns before proceeding with any additional construction of physical barriers in Big Bend National Park or Big Bend Ranch State Park,” Cornyn wrote.
Основное содержимое страницы с новостью.
Some of the most pristine Texas land, full of centuries of history and a bounty of biodiversity, is beginning to feel the full weight of a two-decade-old border security law the Trump administration is wielding with force.
The Trump administration sent bulldozers and other equipment into Big Bend National Park last week to build roads and possibly some vehicle barriers in a very remote stretch of the border that opponents say gets very few illegal immigration crossings because of sheer cliffs on the U.S. and Mexico sides and other rugged and hostile terrain.
Using the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to secure the border through barriers and technology, the Trump administration waived more than two dozen laws to launch the construction. The Federal Register notice in May allows the Department of Homeland Security to waive all federal, state, and local laws to build a border “fence” as quickly as it needs.
The intrusion of the heavy equipment into the desert landscape where only the hardy dare to hike or paddle watercraft on the Rio Grande has set off alarms among folks in nearby communities happy for the vast stretches of land, the star-drenched night skies, the soothing quiet and the occasional pockets of no cellphone service that lie between them and the politics of Washington.
Videos of a work crew pulling trees and brush as they bladed a road through parkland were posted last week. Santa Elena Canyon, with sheer cliffs that rise to 1,500 feet, can be seen in the backgrounds of some videos. Similar cliffs are also found on the Mexican side of the border, creating the canyon.
Locals say that Customs and Border Protection and DHS have said the road is an access road and that there are no plans for a wall at Santa Elena Canyon.
“But having an additional road, I don’t see it providing any other type of assistance for border security,” Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland said.
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Cleveland is a 26-year veteran of the Border Patrol, with 11 years as agent in charge at the Sanderson Border Patrol station, and he is a Republican. He said there is little to no illegal immigration activity where the construction work for the road is going on and in other places where border barriers and walls are planned.
Altogether, he said, Cleveland has 15 years on the border, and in that time, Border Patrol leadership in the area had no plans for permanent structures in the area that is known as the Big Bend sector, except in a few areas where a car can drive across a river bend.
“What we planned for is technology and manpower,” he said.
Cleveland is one of the five sheriffs responsible for law enforcement in the counties of the Big Bend border region who signed a letter in March opposing a border wall in the region, which includes the national park, a state park, and land stretching across their five counties.
“Based on decades of combined experience working this terrain, we believe that construction of a continuous physical border wall in the Big Bend region would not represent the most practical or strategic approach to border security in this area,” the letter says.
Cleveland said the billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on roads and other construction could be better spent on more autonomous surveillance towers, which include cameras and radar units atop 20-foot-high towers and use AI to monitor human movement. They cost about $1 million apiece. He also said drones like those used in Afghanistan are “what works best.”
Exactly what is planned and what land, public or private, it might intrude on have been hard to pin down. Locals and leaders have complained that what officials posted or publicized is not necessarily what is intended.
Customs and Border Protection said in an emailed statement that it is using money provided in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to construct a smart wall that is designed based on “operational requirements” provided by the Border Patrol with both deterrence and “access and mobility required to secure the border” in mind.
The agency said that construction has not started in Big Bend National Park but that construction crews were “onsite re-grading roads that were damaged by recent storms that are required for access to conduct surveys.”
The contractor is “cleaning out areas to support the design and survey phase, ahead of the start of construction activities,” CBP said.
“CBP is not planning to construct [a] 30-foot-high barrier in Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. CBP is planning for approximately 200 miles of patrol roads and detection technology along with approximately 17 miles of non-contiguous areas of vehicle barriers in strategic locations,” the agency said.
In this area where tax-and-spend isn’t easily swallowed, there is a rumble of discontent about what some see as off-the-mark border security spending.
“You know they’ve claimed no quote-unquote wall through the park, but it’s also clear they’re on a crazed road-building spree, because you know it’s a way to spend money and make money. It’s not that these roads are needed,” said Susan Hays, a Democrat who is running unopposed for the county commission in Presidio County, which borders Brewster County, where the national park is located.
Part of the reason people go to Big Bend National Park, an 801,163-acre park established in 1935 and deeded in 1944, is “to go on rough ranch roads on their four-wheel-drive vehicles and get to places where nobody else can get for the solitude,” Hays said. “And they are destroying that.”
Fossils and petroglyphs — and the remnants of a dark period in Texas history
The park, which includes the Chisos Mountains, has remote hot springs, panoramic canyons, fossils and ancient petroglyphs, to name a few of its highlights. It is home to at least 450 bird species, including the Colima warbler and the Lucifer hummingbird, as well as a good variety of flora and other fauna.
It is also loaded with history and outdoor recreation that provides livelihoods for outfitters and others.
The foliage that is being rolled over by a bulldozer in the video of the road construction looks like brush to a lot of people, but “those are some of the only trees in the desert of the park. That’s where migratory birds roost and get some water,” Hays said.
Jerry Patterson, former head of the Texas General Land Office, was driving out to the region when NBC News reached him Monday. He worked on a 2017 documentary about the Porvenir Massacre, the 1918 execution of 15 men and boys, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, by the Texas Rangers. Descendants of those who were killed, as well as historians, cite the importance of preserving the site as part of Texas history — and an example of the type of sanctioned killings and lynchings of Mexican Americans and Mexicans that took place in the American Southwest.
The massacre site is in the location where the road work was being done, said Patterson, who is a Republican. He was on his way to find out what of the historical area remains intact.
“We are still learning stuff, but we now won’t be able to because the contractor and CBP have bulldozed the site of the massacre,” Patterson said, adding that the site is on private property.
“They are not respecting private property and state property,” he said, noting a recent cease-and-desist letter State Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham sent to a contractor over its work on state land in Presidio County.
The land is leased for grazing, which raises revenue for the Texas school fund.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn has added his voice in support of local and state residents, asking DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a letter to meet with the Texas border sheriffs, county judges and private landowners who have raised “significant concerns” about planned construction in the region.
The Secure Fence Act allows DHS to consider alternatives to physical barriers and requires consulting with local governments, Indian tribes and property owners to minimize impact, which DHS has done in the past, Cornyn wrote in the Aug. 7 letter.
“I would ask that you or your designees meet with Texas stakeholders directly to discuss their concerns before proceeding with any additional construction of physical barriers in Big Bend National Park or Big Bend Ranch State Park,” Cornyn wrote.
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