Customs and Border Protection stopped all construction activity inside Big Bend National Park on Monday, with CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott announcing the pause personally and tying it to an on-the-ground inspection he intends to conduct himself.
"CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation," Scott said in a social media post.
The halt came after footage emerged earlier this month showing bulldozers cutting through the Chihuahuan Desert inside the 800,000-acre—roughly 325,000-hectare—park along the Texas-Mexico border. The Trump administration had not announced the project before construction began and initially denied any work was underway.
The construction is part of a multibillion-dollar "smart wall" expansion funded by the $46.5 billion Congress approved for border wall construction in the spending bill President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025. Scott has said he expects CBP to complete the first layer of the wall by the end of next year.
Criticism crossed party lines. Texas Sen. John Cornyn sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asking him to halt construction. Cornyn argued the terrain itself serves as a natural deterrent.
"My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own sources of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States," Cornyn said in the letter.
Cornyn's letter stands out. Texas Republicans have largely stayed silent on the construction, making the senator's direct request to Mullin one of the clearest expressions of intraparty friction the project has generated. Cornyn, who is not seeking re-election, addressed his letter to the cabinet secretary with direct authority over CBP.
Environmental groups had already raised alarms before the Republican pushback surfaced. Laiken Jordahl, a public lands advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, described the scale of the work inside the park's most trafficked areas.
"They're bulldozing a brand new road through the most beloved stretch of the park," Jordahl said.
Big Bend is Texas's largest national park and its most visited. The Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem it protects is one of the most biologically diverse in North America, a fact environmental groups cited in calling the construction an irreversible intrusion into protected federal land.
The administration's initial denial of the project, followed by footage of active construction, left the agency in a defensive posture. Scott's announcement reframed the pause as a deliberate evaluation rather than a response to public pressure, though the timing—days after the footage circulated widely—makes the sequence clear.
The core legal and jurisdictional question the pause leaves unresolved is whether CBP has authority to build border infrastructure inside a National Park Service unit without public notice, an environmental review or congressional sign-off specific to that location. The $46.5 billion appropriation in the July 2025 spending bill funded a broad wall expansion, but whether that funding gives CBP blanket authority to work inside a protected national park has not been adjudicated.
Scott has not given a date for his on-site visit or said how long the pause will last. He has not said whether the evaluation will result in a permanent halt, a reroute or a resumption of the current path through the park.
