Active-duty military personnel could return to patrol Big Bend National Park for the first time in nearly three decades, following a surge of troops sent to the border by President Donald Trump in January, during his first week in office.
Negotiations between park leadership and U.S. Northern Command began in earnest last week, sparking anxiety among some in the region.
Sam Karas, who reports for the Big Bend Sentinel, said there is currently Border Patrol activity in the park, but not a military presence.
“There is a Border Patrol substation within Big Bend National Park. And so those employees are split patrolling different areas of the park, doing kind of normal Border Patrol stuff, but they have their own special little station within the park,” she said. “And then they also have a role, of course, at the Boquillas Port of Entry. And that’s the current border security infrastructure that exists in the park.”
However, there’s a history of a military presence in this area dating back to before the establishment of the national park. The last time there was military activity inside the park was in the 1990s, Karas said.
» MORE: Longer lines and less-safe conditions: How National Park Service staffing could impact Texas
“In 1989, George H.W. Bush created JTF6, or Joint Task Force 6,” she said. “This was essentially a group of different branches of the military, different groups coming together to address the war on drugs.
“And in 1993, some of those JTF6 members arrived in the Big Bend, and they were supposed to be working on engineering projects. So for the most part, they were working with local ranchers and with the park itself to fix up roads in exchange for access to those lands.”
During that ongoing project, a member of the task force shot and killed a local high school student, Karas said. Because of this, local residents are wary of the military returning to the Big Bend region.
“The mood in and around the park right now is very tense. There’s a lot of uncertainty. A lot of unknowns. A lot of change has happened very quickly in the past months,” she said. “And the military issues specifically, a lot of folks in this region are still grieving what happened the last time the military was here.
“In 1997, a member of JTF6, Cpl. Clemente Bañuelos, shot and killed a Presidio High School senior in Redford, Texas, which is a tiny town on the border. And it really was the end of the idea of using the military to patrol the United States domestically.”
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
A lot is still unknown about how this might play out going forward, Karas said. But the park administration has said the goal is to keep the military and park visitors separate as much as possible.
“The issue is, if you’ve ever been to Big Bend, especially if you’ve been to the eastern edge of the park, if you’ve ever been on a river trip in Big Bend, you know that it’s not an entirely sterile environment, that there’s people hanging out in the river, there’s people going fishing, there’s people grilling,” Karas said. “There’s lots of back and forth, lots of interaction between people on both sides. And the real worry is that something like what happened [in 1997] could happen again.”
