The first section of a 30-foot-high steel bollard wall has gone up in the Big Bend region, environmental activists said Wednesday.
While construction is still paused on the White House-ordered border barrier within Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park until Sept. 30, construction on the government’s planned wall is moving ahead on private land in the region.
“We have no idea what’s going to happen on Oct. 1, as negotiations and plans are still in development,” West Texas environmental activist and photographer Natalie Newman said in a video posted to Instagram on Wednesday. “But they still absolutely plan to build a wall upstream of the national park.”
The wall construction is taking place in Hudspeth County, the westernmost extreme of the Big Bend Sector.
That region is the U.S. Border Patrol’s largest sector, representing a land mass of 165,154 square miles, including most of West Texas, the Texas Panhandle and all of Oklahoma.
However, despite its size, the area represents the lowest number of Border Patrol encounters per year of any sector the agency patrols, according to CBP data. In 2025, the Big Bend Sector accounted for just 1.3% of all Border Patrol apprehensions.
According to CBP’s publicly stated plans for the region, the agency plans to build 165 miles of 30-foot steel border wall through Hudspeth County and the town of Presidio. The federal government awarded a $1 billion contract to Montana-based Barnard Construction Co. to complete the project, which is contracted separately from the plans for the parks in the region.
“CBP themselves have claimed that Trump has secured the border. And yet, they’re moving ahead with plans to spend billions of dollars on entirely unnecessary infrastructure that will irreparably harm this sensitive desert ecosystem, sacred indigenous sites and cultural resources, local economies, generational livelihoods and wildlife habitat and migration,” said Newman, the environmental activist.
Laiken Jordahl, an environmental advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an Instagram post that he and other activists visited the region the week before and saw preparation for a major construction project.
“When we visited this location last week, construction crews had amassed the largest staging area I’d ever seen and scraped the desert bare as far as the eye could see,” Jordahl wrote.
“This destruction is only the beginning,” Jordahl added. “Seizing land, walling off communities, cutting wildlife off from their only water source, pumping billions of gallons of groundwater without permits, bulldozing archaeological sites, all done in violation of our nation’s most important protections — that’s what’s in store here and for the rest of the Big Bend region if we don’t stop these horrific plans.”
In response, the Center for Biological Diversity was among the groups that “scrambled” to file an emergency injunction to cease construction in the region, Jordahl said.
“And we will continue to fight this devastation ripping across the wildest corner of Texas, every step of the way,” Jordahl added.
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