‘It’s massive destruction’: outcry in Texas over waivers to allow border wall in Big Bend national park

Despite plunging border crossings, the Trump administration is circumventing laws to expedite building in a vast, pristine wilderness The Trump administration has waived a slew of environmental and historical preservation laws that would allow it to build a towering border wall that cuts through Big Bend national park, a vast protected wilderness in south Texas. Congress poured a whopping $46.5bn for border wall construction into the “Big, Beautiful” bill last year, supercharging Donald Trump’s ambition to wall off the southern border with Mexico. The longest unwalled stretches lie along a roughly 500-mile (800km) section of west Texas that Customs and Border Protection calls the “Big Bend sector”. That corridor includes some of the largest chunks of protected land in a state that is 95% privately owned, including Big Bend national park, Big Bend Ranch state park and Black Gap wildlife management area. The prospect of marring those landscapes in the name of border security at a time of plummeting unauthorized immigrant crossings has drawn fierce backlash from a bipartisan group of local leaders and protest from public land users. The notion of walling off Big Bend nationa