In September, Texas landowners filed a separate lawsuit over the federal government’s border barrier plans in the Big Bend region, claiming their constitutional rights were being violated.
Carlos Morales
/for NPR.
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Carlos Morales
/for NPR.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to continue plans to build hundreds of miles of border barriers and security infrastructure in West Texas while a court hearing on those efforts moves forward.
The federal government’s plans have drawn bipartisan backlash because of the inclusion of Big Bend National Park, a beloved stretch of public land known for its vast canyons and pristine desert landscape.
In a five-page decision released Mondaythe high court wrote that the federal judge who ruled on the order did not have the authority to rule.
“The injunction thus prevents the government from furthering its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity,” the unsigned ruling states. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter in the decision.
The court wrote that federal law allows Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to waive environmental protection and conservation laws, which they called a “clear preference for rapid border construction over the very harms defendants claim.”
In an emergency request in the High Court of end of OctoberThe federal government urged judges to step in and allow work to resume, saying a gap in “border defenses” in the Big Bend region would “act as a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors.”
Along the border in the Big Bend region of Texas, local residents posted signs protesting the Trump administration’s border security plans for the region.
Carlos Morales/for NPR.
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Carlos Morales/for NPR.
A federal judge in El Paso issued a temporary injunction that halted construction of 30-foot-high steel barriers, patrol routes, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure.
The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, filed the suit, along with an area nonprofit working to preserve a historic church near the U.S.-Mexico border and a landowner who faces losing his border property.
“This decision gives the green light to entrepreneurs and allows bulldozers to return in force to the region,” said Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity. “It allows for the blasting of canyon walls in national parks, the bulldozing of pristine desert.”
The lawsuit claimed that Department of Homeland Security plans are unconstitutional and that Big Bend residents would be “irreparably harmed” if construction continued.
The Trump administration’s plans for Texas’ beloved Big Bend region have provoked an unusual bipartisan reaction. People across the political spectrum say a wall is unnecessary in the Big Bend, a region known for its vast canyons, rugged terrain and unforgiving desert heat. They are worried about the threats that a wall or any other type of infrastructure poses to the region, the impact on the environment. environment And Indigenous sites to the effect on the region tourism-based economy and on wild animals.
In the emergency of the Trump administration application for relief to the Supreme CourtSolicitor General John Sauer called the injunction “baseless” and “unprecedented” and said any pocket of the Big Bend without a barrier “would become a funnel point for illegal alien crossings that are thwarted by barriers elsewhere.”
Historically, the rugged landscape of the Big Bend region has led to a decrease in the number of people attempting to cross the border into the United States through this pocket of the border. And although the Big Bend sector, a nearly 500-mile stretch covered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, makes up more than a quarter of the U.S.-Mexico border, it consistently sees the fewest encounters along the Texas border. according to CBP data.
In September, the group No Big Bend Wall came to a usually busy intersection in the small town of Marfa, Texas, to protest the Trump administration’s border security plans for Big Bend.
Carlos Morales/for NPR.
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Carlos Morales/for NPR.
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