Government agrees to extend pause on border wall construction inside Big Bend National Park

The federal government told a judge in San Antonio on Friday that it would extend a pause on border-wall construction inside Big Bend National Park until at least Sept. 15, a concession that came after bulldozers began carving new roads through one of the country's most remote wilderness areas and drew objections from Native American groups, environmentalists, ranchers and lawmakers from both parties.

The commitment, made during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia, applies to the national park and to a stretch of land upriver and west of it, according to a Justice Department lawyer who addressed the court. It does not resolve the underlying legal fight, which centers on whether the Department of Homeland Security has the authority to build roads, vehicle barriers and surveillance towers inside a park that Congress placed under the exclusive stewardship of the National Park Service.

"Congress gave them the authority," government lawyer Pamela Amaechi told the court. "Congress has spoken."

The numbers

The construction paused in Big Bend is one small piece of a much larger undertaking. The work falls under a roughly $46 billion administration plan to build roughly 2,000 miles of barriers, roads and detection technology along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, using 30-foot steel bollard walls where terrain allows.

The legal basis for building inside the park traces to a determination published in the Federal Register on July 2, in which Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin invoked Section 102 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act to waive, "in their entirety," 29 federal statutes for a defined project area spanning the Big Bend and Del Rio sectors. The suspended laws include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, among others. The notice cites Border Patrol data showing more than 89,000 apprehensions and roughly 87,500 pounds of marijuana, 867 pounds of cocaine and 94 pounds of fentanyl seized in the Big Bend Sector between fiscal years 2021 and 2025 as justification for the "acute and immediate need" to build there.

Opponents dispute that the park itself drives those numbers. In court filings, the Center for Biological Diversity has argued that the Big Bend Sector accounted for only about 1.3% of nationwide border-crossing apprehensions in 2025, and that just a small fraction of those occurred within the park's roughly 118 miles of river frontage, with no documented unauthorized vehicle crossings in the immediate area.

How we got here

Big Bend National Park, established in 1944 along the Rio Grande in far West Texas, covers more than 800,000 acres of Chihuahuan Desert, limestone canyons and the Chisos Mountains, and is one of the least-visited but most ecologically diverse parks in the National Park System. Construction crews began clearing brush and cutting new roads near Santa Elena Canyon in early August, work that CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott initially described as "survey and design work" rather than wall-building, and not the construction of a 30-foot wall or stadium-style lighting through the park.

Images and satellite documentation of bulldozers working close to Santa Elena Canyon and Mariscal Mountain circulated widely, prompting a bipartisan backlash that included a letter from dozens of Texas state legislators urging Gov. Greg Abbott to intervene, a cease-and-desist notice from the Texas General Land Office, and a request from Republican Sen. John Cornyn for a stakeholder meeting with federal officials. Scott visited the park in person the week of Aug. 24 to meet with local officials and subsequently ordered his own temporary pause on activity, which had been set to expire this week before Friday's court commitment extended it.

Two overlapping lawsuits followed. On Aug. 14, the nonprofit People of La Junta for Preservation filed suit in San Antonio federal court alongside Lipan Apache tribal members and Jessica and Billy Bartko, owners of the Terlingua-based river-guiding company Far Flung Outdoor Center, arguing the project violates federal law governing national parks and the plaintiffs' religious freedom to access burial and ceremonial sites. A separate case brought earlier by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church and a Big Bend-area landowner is pending before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso; a preliminary-injunction hearing in that case, scheduled for this Thursday, was postponed after the government agreed to extend its construction pause through Sept. 15 in that matter as well.

Who is affected

The plaintiffs describe a landscape and a way of life they say is at stake. Far Flung Outdoor Center depends on public access to a stretch of the Rio Grande that runs through the proposed project corridor; Lipan Apache members say the affected terrain includes sites used for burial and religious ceremonies protected under federal religious-freedom law. Local business owners in Terlingua and Study Butte, whose economies rely heavily on the roughly hundreds of thousands of annual visitors the park draws, have also raised concerns about the effect of heavy machinery and new roads on the region's appeal as a dark-sky, backcountry destination.

The government, for its part, argues the project is limited in scope — a single new access road, improvements to existing roads, detection technology and vehicle barriers at specific points — and says no final construction plans for the interior of the park have been decided. Justice Department attorneys told Judge Garcia on Friday that the pause was intended to give both sides time to negotiate a resolution rather than concede the underlying legal dispute.

Reaction

"We've been watching the permanent destruction of a great American national park unfold in real time," said Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity, warning that without a binding order, "contractors could resume bulldozing deeper into the national park, causing irreversible damage to the wildest place in Texas."

Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who argued alongside the plaintiffs in Friday's hearing, called the extended pause a "win," even though it remains temporary and non-binding. He said any delay that pushes the dispute past November's midterm elections could work in opponents' favor if control of Congress shifts and lawmakers revisit border-wall funding. A bipartisan bill that would have barred wall construction inside the park failed to advance in the House in June.

Judge Garcia, addressing both sides in court, said he hoped the additional weeks would let the government and the plaintiffs "come together to work out what could be done to address both sides' concerns," rather than requiring the court to resolve the dispute through further litigation.

What happens next

No construction activity is expected inside Big Bend National Park before Sept. 15, when the current commitment lapses. Unless the two sides reach a settlement or the pause is extended again, the litigation is expected to continue in both the San Antonio and El Paso federal courts, where judges Garcia and Cardone are weighing whether the Department of Homeland Security's waiver authority under the 1996 immigration law extends into land that Congress placed under National Park Service jurisdiction. Because the pause was agreed to in court rather than imposed by binding order, opponents say they intend to keep pressing for a formal injunction that would prevent construction from resuming even after mid-September.