Supreme Court Clears Way for Border Wall Construction to Resume in Big Bend

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal injunction that had halted construction of President Trump's border wall across Texas's Big Bend region, allowing bulldozers and contractors to return to a stretch of the Rio Grande that includes Big Bend National Park. The order, issued over the dissent of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pauses a lower court's ruling while the government's appeal moves forward, but it does not decide the underlying legal fight over whether the Department of Homeland Security exceeded its authority in waiving dozens of environmental and land-use laws to speed the project.

The unsigned order came in Mullin v. Friends of the Ruidosa Church, docket 26A560, an emergency application the Trump administration filed on October 21 asking the justices to set aside an injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso. The stay allows construction to resume while the government's forthcoming petition for Supreme Court review is pending; it will lapse automatically if the justices decline to hear the case, or upon final judgment if they do.

A 517-mile sector, a fraction of apprehensions

The project area covers roughly 500 miles of the Rio Grande and touches the Border Patrol's Big Bend sector, which spans 517 miles, or close to a quarter of the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Despite its size, the sector recorded a small share of nationwide enforcement activity: government filings put Big Bend's share of 2025 border apprehensions at about 1.3 percent, and the portion occurring specifically inside Big Bend National Park at a fraction of that. The government has countered that roughly 89,000 people were apprehended in the broader sector between 2021 and 2025, and argues that even a comparatively low rate does not mean the area falls outside the "high illegal entry" standard that triggers its waiver authority.

Those waivers — three of them, issued between February and July by then-Secretary Kristi Noem and her successor, Markwayne Mullin — rely on a provision of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that lets the Homeland Security secretary set aside legal requirements to speed border barrier and road construction. The waivers at issue suspended close to thirty federal statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, inside and around Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park — the first time, according to challengers, that such a broad set of environmental protections has been set aside within a national park.

How the case reached the justices

Bulldozers first moved into the park in early August, cutting vehicle-barrier routes near Santa Elena Canyon and on Mariscal Mountain. Customs and Border Protection paused the work on August 17 after public criticism, but the pause lapsed at the end of September without further action from Congress or the courts. The Center for Biological Diversity, a landowner and river guide, and the nonprofit Friends of the Ruidosa Church then sued, and on October 2 Judge Cardone ordered all construction-related activity in the project area stopped "until and unless" the government complied with applicable law. In a written opinion two weeks later, she went further, finding the challengers likely to prevail on the merits.

"The Court finds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their major questions doctrine claim that the Big Bend Waivers were issued in excess of the Secretary's authority," Judge Cardone wrote in her October 14 opinion.

Cardone reasoned that if Big Bend — which she found has one of the lowest rates of illegal crossings on the entire border — could qualify as an area of "high illegal entry," then the waiver authority would effectively apply everywhere, rendering the statute's limiting language meaningless. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the administration before the Supreme Court, argued that the 1996 law allows judicial review of the waivers only for constitutional violations, not for claims that the secretary exceeded his statutory authority, and that Congress had in any case clearly empowered DHS to waive requirements it deems necessary for expeditious construction.

Ranchers, outfitters and a bipartisan objection

The dispute has drawn an unusual coalition of opponents in a conservative stretch of West Texas. More than 140 outfitters, guides and local businesses signed a letter urging state leaders to intervene, arguing the barriers threaten a tourism economy built around the park's canyons and river. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, wrote to Secretary Mullin in August asking DHS to meet directly with affected residents before proceeding, telling the agency that "the requests from local officials and community leaders for coordination and communication appear very reasonable to me," according to his office's published letter. Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who takes Cornyn's seat in January, has gone further, calling the project a waste of money that no Texan requested.

For the plaintiffs, Monday's order means contractors can resume grading and barrier work while the broader legal question — whether Congress gave the executive branch open-ended power to bypass environmental law near the border — remains unresolved. Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has more than 1.8 million members, said in a statement that the administration is "hellbent on destroying one of America's greatest national parks" and warned that contractors could do lasting damage to the canyon landscape before any court rules on the waivers' legality.

The physical scope of the project remains disputed even among supporters and opponents. Customs and Border Protection has said its current plans do not call for a continuous 30-foot steel wall inside Big Bend National Park itself; rather, the agency describes vehicle barriers, surveillance towers and new patrol roads within the park, with taller wall segments concentrated in the Presidio and Hudspeth county stretches of the broader project area. Critics say that distinction has done little to ease concern, since the roadwork and barrier construction still require grading, blasting and heavy equipment in terrain that has had minimal development. A separate lawsuit filed in Washington by a group of landowners and the nonprofit Conserve Big Bend raises similar claims against the same waivers and remains pending, meaning Monday's order is unlikely to be the last word from the federal courts even on the emergency-relief question.

What happens next

The stay is explicitly temporary. It expires automatically if the Supreme Court denies the government's forthcoming petition for certiorari, or, if the petition is granted, once the Court issues a final judgment in the case — meaning the underlying question of whether DHS's waivers exceeded its statutory authority is still very much alive. Cardone's district court retains jurisdiction over the broader suit even as construction resumes, and the plaintiffs have signaled they intend to keep pressing their claims.

In the meantime, the practical effect is immediate: barrier and road crews that stood down after Cardone's October order are expected to return to the park and surrounding ranchland this week. Customs and Border Protection has been building new border barriers nationwide at a pace of roughly 12 miles a week, funded in part by the $46 billion Congress approved for wall construction last year, according to reporting by the Associated Press. How much of that capacity now shifts to Big Bend, and how quickly, will depend on decisions DHS has not yet made public. The case will continue to be watched closely by legal observers tracking how the Court's conservative majority applies the major questions doctrine — typically invoked to limit federal agency power — in a case where the government, rather than a challenger, is now the one benefiting from a narrower reading of that doctrine's reach.