Since late last year, the idea of new border barriers in the Big Bend region of West Texas has been the subject of shifting plans and limited formal explanation from the Trump administration—leaving landowners and local officials to piece together what was changing and where. In the latest CBP outline, the agency says 30-foot-high steel bollard walls would be built along roughly 175 miles of the border outside Big Bend National Park, while the park itself would receive a different mix of barriers, technology and roads rather than a full-height wall.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s current plan calls for physical barriers in three separate wall projects, each with contracted work already awarded in March. CBP says the projects would cover stretches in Hudspeth, Jeff Davis and Presidio counties, with the agency describing the overall work timeline as “sometime in 2027.”
CBP’s three wall projects include what it labels Big Bend 1, Big Bend 2 and Big Bend 3. Big Bend 1 would run from Sierra Blanca, Texas to near the Hudspeth-Jeff Davis County line, and Big Bend 2 would run from Ruidosa, Texas to near the Madera Canyon Campgrounds in Big Bend Ranch State Park. Big Bend 3 would run from the Hudspeth-Jeff Davis County line to Ruidosa.
The contracts awarded in March for those wall projects total about $3.1604 billion, according to the CBP plan as relayed to Marfa Public Radio. A $1 billion contract for Big Bend 1 went to Barnard Construction, a $1.2 billion contract for Big Bend 2 went to Fisher Sand and Gravel, and Big Bend 3 was awarded to Barnard Construction for $960.4 million.
CBP also described additional contracting for oversight work. In late April, CBP awarded a $4.4 million federal contract to Tierra Right of Way Services for “BB-3 Border Barrier Project Construction Monitoring Services,” and CBP told Marfa Public Radio that the work is for “environmental and cultural monitors” for that stretch of wall.
CBP’s outline also draws a sharper line when it comes to Big Bend National Park. CBP told Marfa Public Radio that it is not planning a 30-foot-high border wall inside the national park, and instead said the park would receive a combination of border vehicle barriers, surveillance technology and patrol roads. CBP said this park work is covered under a separate project it labels Big Bend 4, running from near the Madera Canyon Campgrounds along the Rio Grande across much of the park to the “Lower Canyons” east of the park.
Local officials met with CBP representatives last week for a status update on the Big Bend area projects, according to Brewster County Judge Greg Henington. Henington said he learned that CBP plans to improve—but not pave—dirt roads in the park, including River Road and Black Gap Road, and that some existing paved roads would be improved. He also said CBP plans to install concrete bollards at locations along the river such as Lajitas, Rio Grande Village and La Linda.
Henington said CBP representatives also told local officials that the agency plans to use infrared cameras and sensors, designed to account for the area’s dark sky designation. Even so, Henington said CBP representatives were ultimately “vague on what electronic surveillance really entails,” underscoring a concern among residents that the agency has not offered clear details on the technology being planned.
The reporting also describes how landowners and residents received notice only after the government’s process began. Landowners along parts of the border wall area first began receiving letters from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—handling real estate acquisition for CBP—in February. The public comment period for that section, which the story says was extended multiple times, was set to close Friday, May 22.
Residents and local officials have also pointed to how quickly aspects of the plan have changed. The story says CBP’s plans have changed multiple times in recent months without formal announcements or press releases from the agency, and that some of the changes were noticed through the agency’s “Smart Wall” map, which disappeared from CBP’s website for several weeks. In March, local officials had been told construction could begin as soon as June 1, but the story says CBP has not provided an updated timeline since.
Even where timelines remain uncertain, the story says some activity has already begun. A federal contractor started moving heavy equipment to the Rio Grande earlier this month for the Hudspeth-Jeff Davis-Presidio County wall project, following a dispute among contractor crews and county officials about “unauthorized” road work that began on a rural dirt road to the border in April. Plans are also underway for a 500-person “man camp” housing facility south of Van Horn, and construction activity there has started in recent weeks, while the local groundwater district considers whether a designated agricultural water well could be used as a commercial well.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also negotiating with landowners, and the story says it remains unclear how many landowners have authorized border wall construction or how many may face eminent domain proceedings and when those would be initiated. For many residents, that uncertainty has helped fuel opposition that spans local elected officials and advocacy groups, including a lawsuit seeking to block the work.
According to the story, CBP’s border wall plans for the remote Big Bend region have drawn bipartisan pushback in recent months, including opposition from five border county sheriffs and a protest in April that drew more than 2,000 people to the Texas Capitol. This week, seven former superintendents of Big Bend National Park sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urging him not to waive federal environmental laws for border barriers in the park, arguing that even new vehicle barriers and roads would be “highly destructive.”
The story also says several concerns raised by residents go beyond the question of whether a wall will be built—spanning potential impacts on wildlife, the region’s dark skies, tourism and flooding along the river corridor. Local officials have been described as spending much of the past several months without detailed information about the plans, but they are now set to meet with CBP officials about every couple of weeks, according to Henington.
At the center of the debate is the question of whether the Big Bend region needs additional permanent infrastructure for border security. The story says the Border Patrol’s “Big Bend Sector” historically has been among the least-trafficked areas of the southwestern border and that apprehensions fell 74% from 2023 to 2025, according to CBP data. It also says the administration has long sought physical barriers across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and that Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term in January 2025 directing the Defense and Homeland Security secretaries to “take all appropriate action to deploy and construct temporary and permanent physical barriers to ensure complete operational control of the southern border.”