From mining to visitor access to wildlife management, public lands have been the source of ample controversy under the Trump administration. The latest debate involves immigration and federal and state lands in Texas.
Big Bend National Park is home to a 118-mile border with Mexico along the Rio Grande River, and as a result, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is planning to construct a long section of high-tech border wall in the park and through other public lands in the state.
The Plan
The Area
According to the CBP website, a map shows that a “smart wall” will be built on multiple areas of public land, including Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. The map’s legend describes these areas as “planned” with “detection technology.”
Big Bend National Park covers around 800,000 acres in Texas, including the Chihuahuan Desert and the Chisos Mountains. It attracted approximately 561,000 and 509,000 visitors in 2024 and 2023, respectively. Presidio County, the area where the wall would pass through, has a population of 5,686, according to census data.
The park is home to a variety of wildlife, including endangered species like the Mexican long-nosed bat and the black-capped vireo, a bird. “The park boasts more types of birds, bats, butterflies, ants, and scorpions than any other national park in the United States,” according to the National Park Service (NPS).
The wall will also go through Big Bend Ranch State Park, which, at a size of 300,000 acres, is Texas’s largest state park. Open since 1991, the park saw about 14,000 visitors in 2024.
The Wall
The smart wall consists of “a steel bollard wall or waterborne barrier, along with roads, detection technology, cameras and lighting, and in some cases a secondary wall — creating an enforcement zone,” according to the CBP. A waterborne barrier is a series of large cylindrical buoys connected together.
The funding for the wall comes from 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which allocated $46.5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for physical border construction.
A DHS press release announced that it awarded a contract to build the wall to Parsons Government Services Inc. In the past, this company has received over $173 million in government contracts for other construction and engineering projects.
On Feb. 17, DHS issued a notice that it would waive 28 environmental protection and historic preservation laws in order to build the wall. Those laws included the Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Clean Air Act, and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The Rationale
In the Feb. 17 waiver notice, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that the Big Bend Sector was “an area of high illegal entry where illegal aliens regularly attempt to enter the United States and smuggle illicit drugs.”
“Between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2025, Border Patrol apprehended over 89,000 illegal aliens attempting to enter the United States between border crossings in the Big Bend Sector,” Noem said.
According to CBP’s own data, Border Patrol had 3,096 encounters with people in the Big Bend Sector in 2025 and 4,921 in 2024, a marked decrease from 11,823 encounters in 2023.
The CBP says that the primary goal of the smart wall is to “gain operational control of the border.”
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project area,” Noem said.
The Reaction
Multiple local and national groups have condemned the idea of building a border wall on these public lands. Opposition centers around three main points: harm to the environment and wildlife, development of the wilderness, and impeding land management.
The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) cited concerns that the wall would block important wildlife migration routes and possibly lead to flooding of the Rio Grande.
There’s also concern over the wall’s effect on cooperation with Mexico’s authorities. “Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the corresponding protected areas on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande are areas of bi-national interest and must be managed accordingly. Dividing this pristine, irreplaceable desert would force residents and resource stewards to manage one side of the river at a time,” NPCA Regional Director Cary Dupuy said in a statement.
Resistance Rangers, an online group that describes itself as a community of off-duty NPS rangers, strongly condemned the move. “The wall would fragment miles of one of the last connected desert ecosystems in North America,” it said in an Instagram post. “Construction road, lighting, and permanent surveillance will disrupt the wilderness character of the park.”
Some groups, including the NPCA, also argued that the land doesn’t need a wall. They claim that the remote, harsh desert landscape is already enough of a deterrent against illegal border crossings. For example, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s webpage describing Big Bend Ranch State Park, it’s widely known as El Despoblado, or “The Uninhabited,” for its rugged, isolated character.
Activism against the wall has sprung up online. There’s already a dedicated advocacy group, No Big Bend Border Wall. An online petition against the wall has received over 25,000 signatures.
CBP has not issued any firm details about construction in the Big Bend area. According to reporting from Marfa Public Radio, county authorities confirmed they have not received any proposals or notifications from federal agencies. Noem said she expects the construction to be completed by early 2028.
GearJunkie reached out to Big Bend National Park and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for comment on this story, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
