Trump administration begins building border wall in Texas's Big Bend

The Trump administration has begun erecting 30-foot steel wall panels in the Big Bend region of West Texas, pushing its signature border project into a remote, wild stretch of the frontier despite a fresh federal lawsuit and intense local resistance.

The first panels went up on 15 September in Hudspeth County, a sparsely populated area east of El Paso, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed. The 47-mile project, dubbed "Big Bend 1", is the first major construction in a 500-mile stretch of the border where natural cliffs and deep canyons have long served as a barrier of their own.

Opponents say the towering steel bollards are unnecessary and destructive. The Big Bend sector historically sees very few illegal crossings, accounting for just 1.3 per cent of border apprehensions in 2025, according to CBP's own data.

Environmentalists who visited the area earlier this month reported a massive mobilisation of heavy machinery. Laiken Jordahl, an advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, described seeing concrete mixing plants, earthmovers, and "the largest amount of scraped bare earth that I have ever seen anywhere along the border".

The start of construction comes just days after a coalition of local landowners, ranchers, and business owners sued the federal government. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, challenges the administration's waiver of environmental laws and seeks an injunction to halt the project entirely.

Because Texas landowners hold the deeds to most of the riverfront property outside the federal parks, the government is having to fight for access yard by yard. More than half of the estimated 400 landowners with Rio Grande frontage have joined the "No Big Bend Wall" coalition to fight eminent domain.

The resulting standoff has left the government with a patchwork of permissions. Activists say contractors are erecting isolated, free-standing panels in the middle of the desert simply because they have nowhere else to build yet.

"They’re moving forward even if the plan is not fully baked," said Clara Bensen, a board member of Conserve Big Bend, the nonprofit leading the local coalition. "They’re just grasping on to whatever little plots of land they’ve managed to get so far."

Even with these hurdles, the administration is moving quickly. Funded by a $46.5 billion congressional spending package, CBP says it has doubled its construction pace across the entire US-Mexico border, averaging 12 miles of new barriers a week. The agency recently marked 200 miles of new wall built since Donald Trump returned to office.

While the current work is concentrated on private land in Hudspeth County, wider plans call for security infrastructure inside Big Bend National Park itself. Work there was temporarily paused last month by CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott after public outcry over bulldozers clearing brush for patrol roads.

Opponents say they will not stop fighting, even if the steel continues to rise. "You talk to people in West Texas and they say even if they put it up, we'll fight for them to take it down," Bensen said. "This fight is not over."