National
Supreme Court says border wall construction can continue in west Texas
In September, Texas landowners filed a separate lawsuit over the federal government‘s border barrier plans in the Big Bend area, claiming their constitutional rights are being violated.
Carlos Morales
/for NPR.hide caption
/for NPR.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to continue with its plans to construct hundreds of miles of border barrier and security infrastructure in west Texas, while a court hearing over the effort moves forward.
The federal government’s plans have stirred bipartisan backlash for its inclusion of Big Bend National Park, a beloved stretch of public land known for its sweeping canyons and unspoiled desert landscape.
In a five-page decision issued Monday, the high court wrote that the federal judge who ruled on the order didn’t have the authority to weigh in.
“The injunction thus impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity,” reads the unsigned decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter in the decision.
The court wrote that federal law allows the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to waive environmental protections and conservation laws, which they called a “clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms respondents assert.”
In an emergency application to the high court in late October, the federal government urged the justices to intervene and allow the work to begin again, saying that 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 Texas’ Big Bend region, local residents have displayed signs protesting the Trump administration’s border security plans for the area.
Carlos Morales/for NPR.hide caption
Carlos Morales/for NPR.
A federal judge in El Paso issued the temporary injunction that halted the construction of 30-foot-tall steel barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure.
The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, brought forward the lawsuit, along with an area nonprofit working to preserve a historic church near the U.S.-Mexico border and a landowner who stands to lose his border property.
“This decision greenlights the contractors and allows the bulldozers to come roaring back into the region,” said Laiken Jordahl with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It allows the dynamiting of national park canyon walls, the bulldozing of pristine desert.”
The lawsuit argued that the Department of Homeland Security’s plansare unconstitutional and that Big Bend residents would be “irreparably harmed” if the construction continues.
The Trump administration’s plans for the beloved Big Bend region of Texas have provoked an unusual bipartisan backlash. People across the political spectrum say a wall isn’t needed in the Big Bend––a region known for its sweeping canyons, tough terrain and unforgiving desert heat. They worry about the threats a wall or any other kind of infrastructure poses to the region, from the impact on the environment and Indigenous sites to the effect on the region’s tourism-based economy and on wild animals.
In the Trump administration’s emergency relief request to the Supreme Court, Solicitor 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 Big Bend area’s rugged landscape has meant fewer people attempting to cross into the U.S. through this pocket of the border. And while the Big Bend Sector, a nearly 500-mile stretch covered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, makes up over a quarter of the U.S.-Mexico border, it regularly sees the fewest number of encounters along the Texas border
In September, the group No Big Bend Wall took to a typically busy intersection in the small town of Marfa, Texas, to protest the Trump administration’s border security plans for the Big Bend.
Carlos Morales/for NPR.hide caption
Carlos Morales/for NPR.
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