Bulldozers began clearing vegetation near Big Bend National Park in Texas as the Trump administration moved ahead with border security construction around the Rio Grande. Social media videos posted on Thursday showed work near the river corridor.
Mike Davidson, a tour guide in Big Bend, said the changes felt deeply personal. He has lived and worked in the region since the 1970s and said there had been little to no communication from the federal government with locals about the changes.
Rio Grande work in Big Bend
The plans include vehicle barriers, surveillance systems and extensive patrol-road construction across the Big Bend region. The park attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and the work puts equipment and earthmoving into a landscape that draws people to the river corridor.
Davidson said, "It's mainly going to be confined to the river corridor, which, for me, is very, very important. I'm a river guy. The Rio Grande has always been the lifeblood, not only my livelihood, but just my kind of emotional well-being for all these years," and added, "[They] might as well send a bulldozer through the graveyard where my parents are buried or something like that. It hits me very strongly."
Local opposition to the plan
Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity called the project "This is the most heinous attack on an American national park in generations," and said, "The administration is preparing to blast hundreds of miles of destructive roads through the wildest place left in Texas and cut off public access to the Rio Grande, all to enrich private contractors." Thaddeus Cleveland, the Terrell County Sheriff and a former U.S. Border Patrol agent for 26 years, said the work was "both unfortunate and unnecessary."
Cleveland said, "We can secure this sector effectively without unnecessarily bulldozing one of the most rugged and treasured landscapes in America," and added, "Border security is too important for one-size-fits-all solutions developed from behind a desk. Big Bend requires a plan built around the realities on the ground." James Talarico called the project "a monument to corruption" after the footage emerged and said, "This week, over the objections of local leaders and communities, bulldozers showed up anyway, wrecking one of our nation's greatest treasures to build an expensive wall on an already existing natural barrier. We need modernized surveillance tech".
The federal plans move ahead without a public explanation in the record here for how extensive the construction will be in Big Bend or when residents will get a fuller accounting of it. For people who work the river, guide visitors or depend on access to the park, the immediate change is already visible on the ground.
