Episode Corrections

The following corrections were identified after publication and are provided for accuracy. Timestamps are approximate.

11:30: The park's 118 river miles include four distinct gorges, not one. The original narration implied a single continuous canyon.

14:10: The 2010 study referenced is Sayre and Knight, "Potential Effects of United States–Mexico Border Hardening on Ecological and Human Communities in the Malpai Borderlands." One point of clarification. The episode's phrasing ("the clearing itself, not the barrier, does the lasting damage") stated this more absolutely than the paper does. The authors describe several contributing mechanisms of ecological harm from border infrastructure, rather than isolating clearing as the sole cause, and their discussion of road-related mortality draws on broader research rather than a specific finding about narrow, low-traffic patrol roads. The paper's overall conclusion that infrastructure associated with a barrier carries significant ecological consequences beyond the barrier itself is accurately represented in the episode.

18:14: The in-park apprehension figure cited in this episode (200) was drawn from Keep Big Bend Wild's earlier public estimate. KBBW has since obtained official 2025 data via a FOIA request to the National Park Service, putting the figure at 123, even lower than reported.

19:25: The waiver discussed at this point in the episode did not include Big Bend National Park; it stopped upstream of Colorado Canyon, within Big Bend Ranch State Park. The waiver that extended into the national park is the one discussed later, at ~26:24. That waiver prompted a second letter from former park superintendents to DHS, which this episode did not include.

20:00: This episode speculated about whether NPS staff understood the distinction between "wall" and other infrastructure when making public statements at the time. That characterization was not adequately supported and should not have been included.

Cold Open

A solitary black bear swims across the sandy-bottomed river, breathing heavily in the desert air. Despite the water's persistent tug pulling her eastward, she easily maneuvers to the opposite bank. Her jet-black fur hangs heavy with water as she pulls herself onto the northern shore of the Rio Grande and continues into Big Bend National Park, 1,252 square miles of federally protected land in southwest Texas encompassing the entirety of a habitat her kind knows well. Or, at least, they used to. As she pushes further north, she begins to climb. The lechuguilla and creosote give way to pine, oak, and juniper. Suddenly, the dry, cracked desert lies far below, but her nose draws her even higher. The air is now heavy with the scent of what awaits above. A cool, wet forest full of food and entirely devoid of black bears. She marches higher into the Chisos Mountains, a forested range of peaks marooned in the Chihuahuan Desert and entirely within the boundaries of the National Park, and discovers what her keen sense of smell, and perhaps an ancestral instinct, has compelled her to come all this way to find. She’s now inside what scientists call a “Sky Island,” a geographically isolated habitat high in the Chisos, complete with its own microclimate and a biodiversity that is unique to this part of the region. Her species used to call this habitat their home, until a few decades ago. You see, this Black Bear — who crossed into the Chisos sometime in the 1980s — was not the first of her species to ever reach this area. Instead, she was the first to RETURN, after more than 40 years of extirpation – or, the complete removal of her species– from this isolated mountain range. By the early 1940s, before Big Bend became a national park, local hunters and agricultural producers had entirely wiped out the Black Bear population in the Chisos Mountains, just one case of the type of predator control that was very common in those days. The population remained alive and well south of the Mexican border, but it would take four decades for another bear to make its way across the river and back into the range. Scientists now estimate that all current Black Bears residing in the Chisos, a population numbering around 20-30 individuals, came from only one or two females naturally reclaiming this lost territory, meaning that this comeback almost didn't happen at all. The area now known as Big Bend National Park is, and has always been, a crossroads. To the mountains, the rocks, and the river, international borders (and what they represent) don’t exist. And to the wildlife of this region, movement across the Rio Grande is as natural as the flow of the water itself. But to the people who came to claim this land as their own and now determine who can enter it, that is not the case. In August 2026, bulldozers began clearing ground along the same stretch of river that our Black Bear crossed over to repopulate the Chisos Mountains. They were clearing land inside the boundaries of the national park to build border patrol roads and vehicle barriers intended to address illegal immigration that, in Big Bend, is almost nonexistent. All of this is being done under a legal order from the United States Federal Government that waived decades of conservation statutes and landscape protections, including the very law that created Big Bend National Park. Suddenly, the land defined by crossings is at a crossroads itself, trapped between the politics of modern America and the very nature of the movement that has defined this ecosystem for millennia.—Although this episode began in the past, its focus is on the present, with an eye to the future. National attention has turned to Big Bend National Park, and decisions that are being made right now will determine what this park, and the surrounding landscape, look like for generations to come. We'll give you the background, and explain what's at stake for Big Bend and the wildlife that live in and travel through the park. Finally, we’ll let you know how you can stay plugged in, and what to pay attention to. This episode was recorded on September 16, 2026, so depending on when you're listening, things may have changed. We recognize that immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border carries intense political and ideological significance. This episode will not attempt to resolve the broader immigration debate. Instead, it will examine the federal government’s stated justification for this particular project, the available immigration data from the Big Bend region, and the likely effects of the proposed infrastructure on the park’s natural and cultural landscape. With that being said, movement is an inherent feature of life, and a natural and essential process for the ongoing health and viability of wild populations. Any barrier that impedes natural movement risks greatly impairing ecosystem health as a whole. That cannot be ignored, regardless of the politicization of international borders and what should be done about them. The future of Big Bend is at risk. What that means for the wildlife that live there, and that have always lived there, hangs in the balance in the desert wind.

Chapter 1

In far southwest Texas, hemmed in by a sweeping curve of the Rio Grande, is the aptly named Big Bend National Park. The park protects more than 800,000 acres—about 1,252 square miles—including the largest intact portion of the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem in the United States. The desert itself covers roughly 200,000 square miles, 90% of which is in Mexico. The park's southern border forms the border of the United States, and bows downward as if it is being pulled towards the equator. Owing to its unique geography, Big Bend is considered a biological crossroads of sorts. The park contains the overlapping ranges of species normally associated with either the eastern or western halves of the continent, and marks both the southern limits of northern species and the northern edge of tropical southern species. Here, they meet and mingle, one of the only places in North America where these interactions take place. All told, scientists estimate that some 450+ bird species live in or travel through Big Bend. Roughly 75 species of mammals, 56 species of reptiles, and 11 species of amphibians coexist among more than 1,200 unique species of plants. In total, there are more than 5,000 distinct documented organisms in this park. Like the Boundary Waters wilderness area 1,500 miles to the northeast, Big Bend National Park is just one part of a binational complex of protected lands including Big Bend Ranch State Park and Black Gap Wildlife Management Area in the U.S., and Cañón de Santa Elena, Maderas del Carmen, and the Ocampo Flora and Fauna Protection Area in Mexico. This massive transfrontier area is bisected by the Rio Grande, which itself is doubly protected as not only a part of Big Bend National Park, but also a Wild and Scenic River in the United States and the Monumento Natural Rio Bravo del Norte in Mexico. Together, these lands encompass more than three million protected acres and more than two hundred miles of river, forming one of the largest transboundary protected areas in North America. The United States and Mexico have cooperated on conservation here for decades, although the individual parks and protected areas remain governed by different agencies and laws. Political boundaries divide their management, but ecological processes continue across them.—Archeological evidence shows a clear line of human occupation dating back roughly ten thousand years. Early researchers believed that any occupation was entirely transient, meaning that the people didn’t live in permanent settlements but would instead move throughout the region. More recently, that assumption has been challenged, and we now know that, at a location called La Junta de los Rios  — about a hundred miles upstream from the park, near present-day Presidio, Texas — there was a settled hub of village life that included farming and the core of a network of long-distance trade that stretched far beyond the Rio Grande. Countless generations of humans have lived in the shadow of the Chisos Mountains. Over the centuries, various cultural groups broke apart and reformed, surviving in many forms, through the arrival of the Spanish Empire, the Independence of Mexico, then Texas, before the eventual absorption into the United States. People still live, work, and organize in the Big Bend region who trace their ancestry and cultural traditions to this landscape. In 1943, Texas deeded the land to the Federal Government, and Big Bend National Park was established in June of 1944. Those living within the boundaries of the new park were told to leave. This decree ended the throughline of human occupation but protected, in perpetuity, the landscape itself. This land’s complex story must be told. Now, more than ever. Because here, and along miles of the Rio Grande, thousands of years of human history, and millions of years of biological processes, are now threatened by bulldozers, backed by the full force of the American federal government.

Chapter 2

The attacks of September 11, 2001, dramatically changed the United States' relationship with its southern border, and kicked off a new era of expanded border security. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build roughly 700 miles of fencing, vehicle barriers, and checkpoints along the border. Security infrastructure went up in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but somehow, Big Bend National Park was largely passed over. The reasoning for this was not just an altruistic desire for the protection of Public Lands, but a practical examination of the conditions on the ground. The park's rugged terrain includes deep canyons, a mountain range, and the Rio Grande, which, for more than half of its length through the park, runs through a river gorge with walls taller than the Empire State Building. Add to that the remoteness and lack of resources within the park, and it was widely accepted that Big Bend functioned as a natural barrier against illegal border crossings. The numbers back this up. According to Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, the federal agency tasked with securing the border, the Big Bend Sector — a massive CBP enforcement area encompassing much of west Texas and all of Oklahoma — covers more than a quarter of the entire US/Mexico border, but rarely accounts for more than a percent or two of total immigration-related apprehensions. We'll revisit that data later in this episode. For two decades, Big Bend’s hostile landscape meant that its unique ecology was left relatively untouched. Earlier this year, that changed. What made it possible was a few lines of text in an immigration bill from the 1990s. Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, signed by President Bill Clinton, granted the Secretary of Homeland Security broad authority to construct border infrastructure and power to waive all legal requirements — including environmental and cultural protection laws — in order to do so quickly. This authority was later expanded by the Real ID Act of 2005.When combined, these two pieces of decades-old legislation have made it so that one official signature can set aside key legislation like the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. These are the foundational laws governing public lands and historic and culturally significant sites in the US, and control what can happen and where. Now, that’s out the window, and the implications for Big Bend are massive. Conservationists know the damage that can be done when protections for wildlife and their habitats are removed. And it’s not just the habitat loss that matters, but the removal of critical habitat connections where the real impacts could be felt. A study from 2018 found that the border bisects the ranges of over 1,500 native plant and animal species. A physical barrier would also sit between park wildlife and their most reliable water source, the Rio Grande, in an arid landscape, during an ongoing drought, on a river diminished by upstream dams, in a progressively drier climate. And here's the part that matters most for Big Bend, where officials keep insisting this is mostly just roads: In 2010, two researchers examined a stretch of barrier built in southeastern Arizona under the Secure Fence Act and reached the conclusion that the infrastructure required to build a barrier does more ecological damage than the barrier itself. The vehicle barriers, they found, were largely permeable — deer, pronghorn, javelina, coyote, and mountain lion all passed under or over them. It was the roads that did the harm. The researchers found the same pattern holds even for narrow, low-traffic patrol roads — the clearing itself, not the barrier, does the lasting damage. That research was conducted on existing vehicle barriers, with large gaps. Those structures could be replaced with 30-foot steel bollard walls, with narrow gaps too tight for humans, or wildlife, to pass through. If that happens, things would get even worse. A 2024 study conducted across 100 miles of border barriers in Arizona found that only 9% of wildlife interactions with the steel bollard wall resulted in a successful crossing, an 86% reduction compared to the old vehicle barriers. The study showed a 0% crossing success rate for deer, black bear, mountain lion, and turkey. This means that wildlife populations were essentially cut into pieces. On the short term, that means losing access to resources like food, water, and historical migration routes. Long-term, that could mean the total collapse of these now-isolated groups. The sudden absence of genetic diversity flowing in and out of a group — called a bottleneck — will lead to higher rates of inbreeding and harmful genetic defects, causing immeasurable damage to populations that may already be struggling. If the Black Bear from this episode's opening tried to make her crossing today, she would find a cleared corridor, a patrol road, and a vehicle barrier waiting on the far bank. And along the 175 miles of 30-foot bollard wall going up outside the park, a bear like her would not get through at all. But, as the research shows, you don't need a thirty-foot wall to sever a population. A cleared road through unbroken desert will do it.  And Big Bend could get both. And for now, it looks like it eventually will. —On the first day of his second term in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to take all appropriate action to deploy and construct temporary and permanent physical barriers along the southern border. Even those who continued to point to the park's dramatic terrain as a sufficient barrier soon lost the budgetary and logistical reasoning they had relied on. When Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill Act" passed in July of 2025, it appropriated 46.5 billion dollars for border wall construction, meaning that cost-benefit arguments no longer mattered. With that much budget, no stretch of border is exempt. After nearly a century, Big Bend's identity as a crossroads for for wildlife was at risk. And all it would take was Trump’s signature.

Chapter 3

The Big Bend Sector border segment covers 517 miles, representing more than a quarter of the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. However, despite its significant size, it sees almost no illegal immigration activity. From October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025, there were only 3,096 apprehensions across the entire sector. This made up just 1.3% of the yearly total for the border, and was the fewest encounters of any stretch in the state of Texas. And that number is falling. According to CBP's own data, apprehensions in the Big Bend Sector dropped 74% between 2023 and 2025. The agency credits autonomous surveillance towers with cutting traffic significantly. Inside the national park itself, the numbers drop even further. Last year, apprehensions in Big Bend made up only 0.045% of the national total, and exactly zero documented unauthorized vehicle crossings occurred in the region. That’s only 200 people apprehended in the National Park, out of 443,000 nationwide. That’s the data the government is citing to justify bulldozing a national park. So, if the pay off would be minimal, what’s the cost? Estimates for the cost of installing and operating the proposed border infrastructure along this stretch come out to roughly $16.5 million per mile. Not total. Per mile. Meanwhile, the Park is a major economic driver in the region, drawing more than 500,000 visitors to the area annually. These visitors spend money on food, lodging, outfitting, and more, and contributed — at least in the year 2024 — $56.8 million to the local economy. What impacts may be felt by local towns and businesses as a result of the ongoing destruction of the natural resource that generates this revenue remain to be seen. Big Bend has, for decades, perfectly done its job as a destination park, an economic driver, and a landscape rugged enough to discourage border crossing attempts. For a long time, everyone was content to leave that delicate balance in place. Until now. On February 17, 2026, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem signed a waiver setting aside 28 federal laws — including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Wild & Scenic Rivers Act — to fast-track the installation of a barrier system through both Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park next door. She did this by invoking the authority ascribed to her by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and Real ID Act mentioned in chapter two, with funding provided by Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. So began the confusing series of declarations and reversals that have defined this project, and the Trump Administration as a whole. CBP published a map of the what they call a “smart wall," a combination of physical barriers with the addition of high-tech surveillance equipment like automated cameras, lighting, motion sensors, and patrol roads. Although this map was made public on CBP's website, what it showed was not entirely clear. When asked by the Texas Tribune and Inside Climate News about this map and the footprint of the planned wall, Don Corrick — Big Bend National Park's public information officer — claimed that he had no knowledge of any plans for a border wall. National Park Service headquarters did not respond to a request for comment at the time. The term "wall" matters a lot here. Technically, barriers, roads, and detection technology are not, strictly defined, a wall. Whether Corrick and other Park staff were aware of that distinction, and what it meant when making their public statements, remains unclear. Whatever the park knew, the money was already moving. In March, DHS awarded federal contracts for three separate border wall projects — Big Bend 1, Big Bend 2, and Big Bend 3 — covering roughly 175 miles through Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, and Presidio counties — the stretch running northwest from the Big Bend region, outside the national park. Big Bend 1, running from Sierra Blanca toward the Hudspeth–Jeff Davis county line, went to Barnard Construction for $1 billion. Big Bend 2, running from Ruidosa down to near the Madera Canyon Campgrounds inside Big Bend Ranch State Park, went to Fisher Sand and Gravel for $1.2 billion. Big Bend 3, filling the gap between them and passing through the tiny town of Candelaria, went back to Barnard for $960.4 million. These are contracts for 30-foot steel bollard walls, with narrow gaps too tight for much of anything to squeeze through. Real ones. Not just detection technology. The awarded contractors have direct financial ties to President Trump. Barnard's chairman and his wife have given more than a million dollars to Trump's campaigns. Fisher Sand & Gravel's history runs deeper — during Trump's first term, the Army Corps rejected Fisher's wall bid over a poor track record, and Trump personally overruled that decision. The same company later built a private wall segment financed by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon's "We Build the Wall" campaign, whose organizers went to prison for fraud. Regardless of the minute details of the construction plans, the backlash was immediate and broad. Public outcry, which had long been simmering, boiled over online and in local protests. A mock border wall was erected in front of a coffee shop in the nearby town of Terlingua, and local businesses began turning away federal contractors. The sheriffs of neighboring Brewster, Culberson, Hudspeth, Presidio, and Terrell counties — a bipartisan group — issued a joint open letter opposing a continuous physical barrier in the region. Notably, they did not argue against border security itself. Their position was that technology could patrol the region's border without the need for extensive permanent infrastructure. Alpine, Presidio, and Hudspeth Counties all passed resolutions against the barrier. A coalition letter from 132 organizations and businesses with a wide range of conservation, resource, human rights, and economic concerns was sent to House and Senate appropriators asking for a funding prohibition ahead of project groundbreaking. In April, more than 2,000 people gathered at the Texas Capitol in Austin to protest, with former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a Republican, leading the chants. In early April, the CBP map was quietly updated — with no official announcement — to show "detection technology" instead of the physical barrier opponents loudly argued against. The following month, in May, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott announced that the agency would not build a border wall inside Big Bend National Park. But still, many within the bipartisan coalition that had quickly formed to fight back against wall construction were wary to declare victory. Bob Krumenaker, former Superintendent of Big Bend National Park and current chair of the advocacy organization Keep Big Bend Wild, declined to call it a win. Instead, he promised that he and others would remain vigilant for any reversals, and demanded a clear public statement of CBP's intent plus a commitment that it wouldn't change again. He also refused to turn a blind eye to Big Bend Ranch State Park next door, for which no changes in the proposed barrier had been documented. Perhaps it was the experience earned from a 41-year career with the National Park Service, or just the ability to see the writing on the wall, but Krumenaker's wariness would soon be proven justified. Around the same time Scott was promising there would be no wall in the park, DHS awarded the fourth contract. Big Bend 4 — the national park project — went to Albuquerque-based Southwest Valley Constructors for roughly $1.7 billion. And for a time, a federal government spending website listed that award as being for, in its own words, a border wall in Big Bend. CBP has repeatedly denied that the contract is for a physical wall. What it actually pays for is 17 miles of vehicle barriers and 205 miles of roads and surveillance technology. Later that same month, new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin published a federal register notice waiving 35 federal laws to allow the installation of additional barriers and roads in the Big Bend sector, notably describing it as an "area of high illegal entry" despite CBP's own apprehension figures showing precisely the opposite. In response, Krumenaker and six other former Park superintendents sent an open letter to Mullin urging DHS to reject the waiver of federal laws without the standard environmental and cultural study compliance and public involvement. Against protests from advocates like Krumenaker, DHS took another step in June, waiving an additional 28 laws across 62 miles. That list included the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It also included the Act of June 20, 1935 — the statute by which Congress authorized the creation of Big Bend National Park in the first place. Let’s repeat that. In order to build inside a national park, the Department of Homeland Security waived the law that made it a national park. In late July, another waiver extended CBP's reach downriver from Big Bend all the way to Lake Amistad, adding the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Wilderness Act to the list of skirted laws. CBP had promised not to build a wall. Instead, DHS systematically dismantled the laws that prevented them from doing anything that they wanted. According to DHS, the project will include improvements to existing public and park roads where possible, paving where needed for drainage and erosion control, detection technology, buried power and fiber optic lines, light poles at ports of entry, and vehicle barriers in limited strategic locations. No reference to a 30-foot wall is explicitly made in any public documents. On July 31, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham issued cease-and-desist letters after a federal contractor cleared more than a mile of state-owned land without permission, asserting that CBP had trespassed on and altered the topography of property of the General Land Office — a state agency that, amongst other duties, manages land leases for oil, gas, and mineral rights. A week later, on August 7, Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote to Secretary Mullin urging DHS to halt construction until the agency consulted with border sheriffs, county judges, landowners, and park advocates. This was no longer a fight between conservationists and the federal government. It was Texas Republicans telling Washington to stop. Washington did not stop. On August 4, heavy equipment was seen being moved into the park. DHS initially told reporters that construction had not started. Two days later, it did. Video obtained by onsite activists showed contractors bulldozing native vegetation along the Rio Grande's riparian corridor with Santa Elena Canyon visible behind them. Critical native plants like willow, palo verde, and mesquite were crushed by the massive equipment. The dramatic image of a Javelina, a type of native peccary, standing at the edge of the cleared ground with a bulldozer working behind it quickly circulated, bringing renewed attention to the Big Bend project. The removal of native habitat here matters because, as Krumenaker points out, the vegetation being bulldozed is riparian forest, one of the more important habitats for wildlife in the park. He called it just the tip of the iceberg. Then there's what we can't see yet. Of the full corridor covered by these projects, only about 17 percent has ever been surveyed by archaeologists. And once a bulldozer goes through an archaeological site, the artifacts and the context that give them meaning are gone. There is no putting it back. So, what's being done to stop it? Opponents have challenged the projects through several separate lawsuits. An April case sought federal records about the government’s plans. In separate litigation, the Center for Biological Diversity and other plaintiffs challenged DHS’s use of its waiver authority. In another case, the Presidio Municipal Development District sued over flood risks associated with construction through the city’s levee system; a judge declined to halt that work temporarily. In August, the organization People of La Junta for Preservation and other plaintiffs filed another lawsuit challenging construction in and around the park. They argue, among other claims, that DHS failed to waive a provision placing administration of Big Bend under the Department of the Interior and therefore lacks authority to proceed without the Park Service’s lawful participation. That is the plaintiffs’ legal argument, not yet a settled ruling from the court. In the meantime, contractors continued to destroy delicate riparian habitat. For eleven days the bulldozers worked, and nothing stopped them — not the letters, not the sheriffs, not the lawsuits or protests. Then, on the night of Sunday, August 16, they went silent.

Outro

Late that evening, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott ordered all construction activity in Big Bend National Park stopped. He announced it publicly the following day in a video filmed in a Texas airport. In the video, he explained that he was personally flying down to the project site to conduct an on-the-ground evaluation and talk to local law enforcement and other stakeholders. Just days earlier, Scott had publicly defended the activity, saying it was nothing more than survey and design work, not construction. Then footage filmed by residents and activists on site — bulldozers ripping native vegetation out of the Rio Grande corridor — began circulating widely, and reached national television. Within days, the machines stopped. We'll let you draw your own conclusions about that sequence. On August 18, Scott met with a bipartisan group of border county sheriffs and judges and told them that the pause would hold for at least two weeks, assuring them that work wouldn't resume until CBP had heard from local stakeholders. Separately, in a federal lawsuit brought by the People of La Junta for Preservation and a Terlingua river outfitter, the government agreed in writing to halt all ground-disturbing activity through September 30 — both inside the national park and along the stretch from Ruidosa into Big Bend Ranch State Park. As of this recording, that halt remains in effect. Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he spoke with DHS Secretary Mullin and was told that there would be no construction of any type of barrier inside the park. But exactly what constitutes a barrier, and how much the federal government can be trusted to keep its word, are both still up for debate. This pause isn’t a cancellation. The $1.7 billion contract stands, and the waivers affecting the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and provisions of the park’s authorizing statute remain legally effective. This pause also only covers what is inside of the park. Roughly 175 miles of 30-foot wall through neighboring Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, and Presidio counties are still moving forward, as are hundreds of miles of patrol roads and detection infrastructure crisscrossing the desert landscape. This matters too, because wildlife live throughout the landscape, not just in the national park. And the ground already cleared inside the park — more than five miles of new road, according to satellite analysis  — is not coming back. Krumenaker said he is wary but optimistic, and said he doubted CBP would abandon its plans for the region entirely. He identified three things he'd be watching for: if the bulldozers and equipment actually leave the park, if CBP publishes a clear plan going forward, and if the damage already done gets repaired. Lawsuits are pending, and activists are seeking more avenues to apply legal and political pressure in many different ways. But there is one thing they all agree on. They are not satisfied with a pause; they’re asking for a full cancellation of the project, and a rescission of the waivers. And, until that happens, Big Bend is still under threat. And on September 14, six landowners and Conserve Big Bend — the nonprofit behind No Big Bend Wall — filed a new federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., on behalf of more than 230 landowners in the region. It argues that the Big Bend Sector doesn't meet the legal definition of an area of high illegal entry, which is the condition DHS's waiver authority depends on in the first place. The case covers the entire region, including the roads and barriers planned inside the national park. As of the recording of this episode on September 16, 2026, that is where we stand. Almost 40 years ago, a female black bear crossed into Big Bend National Park. She wasn't following a border or a set of laws and policies. She was following a river and her nose to a place that generations of her kind before her had called home, and generations after her have reclaimed. For now, that crossroads remains. For how much longer depends on what happens next.(Pause)For six months, local resolutions, lawsuits, letters from former NPS superintendents, and statements from sheriffs did nothing. What did was sustained, visible, and local bipartisan So, how can you stand up for Big Bend? There are three things you can do right now. First, contact your representative and senators. In June, a proposal to bar federal money from being spent on barriers in Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park failed in the House Appropriations Committee on a party-line vote. Congress has used that kind of funding prohibition to protect other places along the border before. You can ask your members of Congress to support one for Big Bend. Second, add your name to Keep Big Bend Wild's call for Congress to designate the park's backcountry as federally protected wilderness, a status the National Park Service first recommended in 1978.Third, sign the petition from No Big Bend Wall opposing construction across the entire region, not just inside the park. No Big Bend Wall is a project of Conserve Big Bend, the same nonprofit that filed the landowner lawsuit on September 14. You'll find links for all three, plus a tool to look up your representatives, at ecocidepod.com/action. If a new public comment period opens, we'll post it there too. You can also support Keep Big Bend Wild and No Big Bend Wall directly. Both are sharing photos, video, and updates from the ground as this story develops. Learn more and find donation links at ecocidepod.com/organizations. We also want to acknowledge the local journalism that made this episode possible. The Big Bend Sentinel in Marfa and Marfa Public Radio have been first on nearly every development in this story, often before national outlets knew there was a story.