The Big Bend — an expansive, quiet and undeveloped area that’s preserved as both state and federal parkland — provides a sense of isolation and freedom from the noisy buzz of city life. But that may change soon, with the arrival of construction equipment and crews building out another stretch of the border wall.
What does this mean for the short and longer-term future of one of Texas’s most pristine landscapes?
Sam Karas, who reports for the Big Bend Sentinel, said the Department of Homeland Security plans to have physical wall barriers running from Fort Quitman, which is outside of Sierra Blanca, to Colorado Canyon, which is about 175 miles of wall.
“(At Colorado Canyon) the smart wall system will take over, and that, of course, is kind of a hybrid of stuff,” she said. “It’s sensors, it’s roads, it’s lights, it’s kind of a more holistic border security strategy. But the traditional wall is now slated to go in somewhere around Presidio.”
This means that, for the most part, within the national park, the Department of Homeland Security is still going to be operating a smart wall system. But in Big Bend Ranch State Park, it’s a much different story, Karas said.
“It has a lot to do with just the naked topography of the land, that the landscape (in the national park) is a lot more rugged, the river is walled in by canyons in many places,” she said. “Where upstream of that, you don’t have quite so much canyon country, and particularly that stretch upstream of Presidio isn’t really a river anymore, it’s kind of just a track of mesquite, and so that’s much more easy for a contractor to tackle.”
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Locals are not happy about the proposed construction.
“I would say this is almost universally despised as an idea and has been for generations,” Karas said. “It’s kind of been part of the standard wisdom that a border wall is just impractical to build in the Big Bend for many reasons.
So people are definitely scared. They’re afraid that the federal government is going to use eminent domain to take their land away from them. And there’s a lot of fear about how this is going to impact our tourism economy, which depends on people being able to access and look at the river.”
Karas said there are also outstanding questions about what exactly will happen with the project.
“When the Department of Homeland Security posted in October that they were going to authorize barrier construction in the Big Bend, they left a lot of environmental protections and cultural resource protections in place, but notably they waived a lot the typical contract-posting requirements that are required for the government to operate with transparency,” she said.
“So a lot of these requests for proposals are being issued in secret, and we’re finding out about it from landowners being approached individually by contractors and engineering firms who are scoping out the potential for a project.”
Based on conversations with those locals, Karas said she doesn’t think contracts have been awarded yet.
“That may not actually be true because we’re not able to publicly access this information. But it sounds like different companies are shopping around,” she said. “And it seems to be companies that have worked in other states, other border wall projects that have personal ties to either President Trump or to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.”
