Big Bend residents and national environmental group sue Trump administration over border wall plan

From Marfa Public Radio:

A West Texas river guide and church preservation group, along with a national advocacy group, are suing the Trump administration for bypassing federal environmental laws to speed up border wall plans in the state’s Big Bend region, arguing the move is unconstitutional and would lead to the destruction of “iconic sections” of the Rio Grande corridor.

Billy Miller, a Terlingua resident and Big Bend area river guide, and the nonprofit Friends of the Ruidosa Church filed the lawsuit in federal court Thursday alongside the Center for Biological Diversity.

“No one comes to Big Bend to see steel walls and razor wire,” Miller said in a statement. “If they build this, they’re not just destroying a landscape, they’re wiping out our way of life.”

The lawsuit targets regulatory waivers issued in February by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The waivers allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bypass a wide range of ecological and wildlife protection laws as the agency pursues a 175-mile stretch of planned border wall in the region from Hudspeth County through much of Presidio County.

While the waivers cover a portion of Big Bend Ranch State Park, CBP has indicated in recent weeks it is not currently pursuing physical walls there or in nearby Big Bend National Park. (The regulatory waivers do not include the national park.)

Thursday’s lawsuit argues the wall would “cleave through the Chihuahuan Desert and sever public access to iconic sections of the Rio Grande.”

The Center for Biological Diversity described the case as a novel legal approach to fighting border wall projects.

The group is arguing in part that the administration’s plan for a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border should be considered within the legal framework of the “major questions doctrine,” in which courts have found that federal regulatory actions with significant nationwide economic and political impacts should be “supported by clear congressional authorization,” as a 2022 explanation from the Congressional Research Service put it.

The U.S. Supreme Court notably cited the major questions doctrine in its February ruling against President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, as the New York Times reported.

“Here, too, we think that this administration’s plan to build the ‘great wall’ – which would be a cross-continental, ocean-to-ocean barrier – that is a major question,” Emma Yip, an attorney with the environmental group, said in an interview.

Yip said the Big Bend area regulatory waivers should be ruled unconstitutional because they advance a “broader, highly consequential project without explicit approval from Congress.”

CBP and the Department of Homeland Security are aware of the lawsuit, a CBP spokesperson said in a statement.

“DHS is reviewing the lawsuit and will respond as appropriate,” the spokesperson said.

The border wall plan has sparked widespread, bipartisan opposition in the Big Bend region and across Texas.

Multiple local governments have in recent weeks approved resolutions arguing the wall would harm their tourism-dependent communities. Republican and Democratic sheriffs in the region have spoken out against the plan, arguing that surveillance technology would be a more effective border security tool given the region’s rugged, mountainous terrain.

Anti-wall advocates have pushed back on recent news headlines suggesting the region’s border wall fight is over, citing the ongoing wall plans for private land in the region. Opponents have also warned that walls are not necessarily off the table in the Big Bend region’s state and national parks.

Inside Climate News recently reported on internal communications between CBP and the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife, in which a CBP official told the state that plans for border walls in the parks were “on hold.” Still, the official did not rule out border walls at a later time.

In the emails also obtained by Marfa Public Radio, Paul Enriquez – a Border Patrol official who directs infrastructure programs – told state officials on March 6 that the state and national park areas were “currently low priorities.”

“Once all our border wall contracts are awarded and the higher-traffic areas are addressed, we will review our plans for these areas to evaluate operational requirements that dictate barrier, roads, and/or technology,” Enriquez wrote.

Members of the advocacy group No Big Bend Wall traveled to Washington, D.C., this week to speak out against the wall plan and held a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol Thursday morning.

The border wall plan is facing growing pushback from local officials in Presidio, the largest town the wall would run through in the Big Bend region.

Presidio’s city council voted Monday to commission a local flood risk assessment as locals worry about the prospect of the wall worsening floods along the Rio Grande. That effort is being led by the Presidio Municipal Development District, a local economic development entity that has already been pressing CBP for answers and expressing concerns to federal officials.

John Kennedy, the group’s executive director, told Marfa Public Radio his organization is filing a declaration supporting Thursday’s lawsuit and is “developing additional claims of our own, particularly regarding the government’s failure to conduct any engineering review before building on the infrastructure that protects our community from the Rio Grande.”

Mary Cantrell contributed reporting.

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