HUDSPETH COUNTY, Texas — Border wall panels are going up in a stretch of west Texas that has become the sharpest test of the Trump administration’s push to line the southern border with steel, with Customs and Border Protection confirming that installation is underway across a 47-mile section of Hudspeth County known as Big Bend 1. CBP said the first panels were erected on September 15.
A photo posted to the agency’s website, where it tracks wall construction along the entire southern border, showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel panels into place while construction workers looked on.
A milestone the administration has been chasing
The start of work in Big Bend marks an important milestone in the administration’s $46 billion plan to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology — the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to finish the wall. CBP says it has doubled the pace of construction across the U.S.-Mexico border, building an average of 12 miles of barriers per week along the 2,000-mile frontier. The agency recently reached 200 miles of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office.
That 12-miles-a-week average is double the pace CBP’s head, Rodney Scott, cited earlier this year. The roughly 500-mile Big Bend region is divided into five project areas, stretching from a section of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.
The new activity is separate from a border infrastructure project in nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has temporarily suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.
Opposition that has not gone away
Across the broader Big Bend region, CBP has run into concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who argue the remote area is not a high-traffic corridor for illegal immigration. Activists said Friday they would keep fighting the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the region even as the panels were installed.
Clara Benson, a founder of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition, said in an interview Friday that the group had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and of contractors clearing yards to stage materials. Speaking from Washington, D.C., where she and other coalition members were meeting with lawmakers, Benson said the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.
“We will continue to fight for this land no matter what the outcome is. We will continue fighting to the end,” she said. “You talk to people in west Texas and they say even if they put it up, we’ll fight for them to take it down.
So this fight is not over.” The administration is pressing ahead with a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls, barriers designed to stop vehicles from crossing, new patrol roads, and technologies meant to deter and detect migrants or smugglers. It has drawn opposition from environmental groups, a small town worried the wall will cause flooding in its area, Native Americans who say construction is disturbing sacred sites, and landowners who say it will infringe on their land.
In Texas, much of that opposition has centered on the agency’s plans for Big Bend National Park. What this signals is a deliberate sequencing choice. The administration is opening construction in a stretch where resistance has been loudest, while holding off in the national park — a split that lets it claim momentum without yet forcing the confrontation that park opponents have organized around.
Whether that pause survives the next round of contracting is the question to watch.
