Seven former superintendents of Big Bend National Park penned a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week imploring the federal government not to waive environmental and cultural resource protection laws fast-tracking border wall construction and to communicate clearly with park staff and the local community about their plans for security infrastructure in and around the park. “There does not need to be a conflict between a strong border, a thriving local economy, and conservation of the wildest, most intact landscapes of Texas and our nation,” the letter reads.
The letter was drafted in response to a series of recent developments in the ongoing saga of barrier infrastructure upgrades along the U.S.-Mexico border. On May 11, DHS awarded Southwest Valley Constructors, a subsidiary of Kiewit, with a massive $1.7 billion contract “for border wall in Big Bend Texas,” and on May 15, the agency waived dozens of laws for a stretch of the Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River in the Lower Canyons.
In an era marked by budget cuts and staffing shortages within the National Park Service, that $1.7 billion contract represents an unprecedented and disproportionate investment in the park, especially on land managed by an agency with an annual budget of around $3.3 billion and a park whose budget typically hovers around $9 million. “If a border wall—or other unnecessary and highly destructive border infrastructure—is built inside Big Bend National Park, it would be the most egregious assault on the integrity of the entire National Park System since the construction of a dam in the Hetchy Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park more than a century ago,” the letter proclaims.
Thanks to the REAL ID Act of 2005, the DHS secretary––an unelected member of the president’s cabinet––can waive any laws they want without congressional approval to support “the expeditious construction of border barriers and roads” in areas of “high illegal entry.”
According to Scott Nichol, a teacher and researcher based in McAllen who has written extensively about the border wall, this power was used relatively sparingly between the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations but exploded under Trump, both in the number of waivers filed and their scope. “The application of waivers and the interpretation of their scope has repeatedly expanded, such that border walls are now privileged over all potential legal constraints short of the U.S. Constitution,” Nichol wrote in a paper called “The Lawless Border Wall.”
In Custom and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Big Bend Sector––an area that includes the national park but is in total larger than the state of California––locals have raised the alarm about the use of these waivers designated for areas of “high illegal entry” in a part of the country where, on average, between 1% and 3% of total illegal crossings take place.
In Big Bend National Park, which spans 118 miles of border, those numbers are even more meager. Data compiled by Bob Krumenaker, a former superintendent of the park and a signatory of the letter, suggests that agency apprehensions within National Park boundaries have constituted an average of 0.02% of nationwide totals over the past decade, including a large post-COVID spike in cross-border migration. (These figures have not been independently confirmed by the Sentinel –– CBP does not publicly release data below the sector level and is currently being sued over its hesitancy to release information justifying the invocation of the waivers.)
In response to a public outcry against a major construction project in the park, DHS has clarified a few points: first, that there would be no 30-foot steel wall built in Big Bend Ranch State Park, Big Bend National Park or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, instead prioritizing “sensors and cameras” and “low-profile” vehicle barriers. At a closed meeting with law enforcement officials on May 14, local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials clarified statements made by Commissioner Rodney Scott to the Washington Examiner earlier in May that construction work in the park would include paving a patrol road along the river.
An online map provided by the agency suggested that the paved “patrol road” would follow the route of the River Road in the National Park, a rough 51-mile route that the National Park Service estimates takes around 5-7 hours to drive. Scott’s plans to pave roads in one of the most remote places in the United States raised a lot of eyebrows, both for its environmental impact and because it would allow a larger number of visitors to travel deeper into the interior of the park, where emergency response is even slower.
The issue has long been controversial for outdoorspeople. Edward Abbey famously inveighed against the paving of roads through public land in his 1968 polemic Desert Solitaire. “We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture,” he wrote. “We should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.”
Krumenaker, who has been spending his retirement leading the nonprofit Keep Big Bend Wild in hopes of protecting most of the park’s acreage from future development, was relieved to hear that the paved road wouldn’t come to fruition. “It would be a knife in the heart of the wild character of the park,” he said.
The National Park Service and CBP have a long history of working together to secure the border in Big Bend National Park. In 2006, DHS, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture signed an agreement laying out how the agencies would work together toward the goal of border security on public land. That agreement emphasizes cooperation between local, state and federal stakeholders and urges all three agencies to “cooperate with each other to identify methods, routes and locations for [CBP] operations that will minimize impacts to natural, cultural and wilderness resources … while facilitating needed [CBP] access.”
While Krumenaker was serving as superintendent of Big Bend National Park, CBP had a now-defunct arrangement with the park that provided some funding for road maintenance with the expectation that park staff would keep roads along the border in good condition for patrols. Even when that funding was still in place, the park’s chronic understaffing made it difficult for maintenance crews to fulfill their end of the bargain––a situation unlikely to improve as the Trump administration continues to chip away at the National Park Service.
The superintendents’ letter acknowledges that some of the roads needed for patrols are in “poor condition.” Over the past three decades, the federal government has used military resources for road work along the border, including during the Clinton administration’s JTF-6 deployment and by the Texas National Guard in 2007. Most of these improvements were wiped out by the historic flood of 2008 and subsequent flooding events.
That includes the River Road, large stretches of which were out of commission for much of last year after the Department of Government Efficiency laid off around 5% of park staff and the Rio Grande hit a major flood stage after a series of summer storms. Krumenaker said that the soft soils in the river corridor and chronic flooding make maintaining that particular road a Sisyphean effort. “You’d need a lot of money to pave it, and it’d just be a terrible waste,” he said.
Besides Krumenaker, the superintendents’ letter was signed by David Elkowitz, Cindy Ott-Jones, Bill Wellman, John H. King, Robert Arnberger, and H. Gilbert Lusk. Between them, the group has 259 years of experience serving in the National Park Service.
They believe that public engagement and common sense is key to meeting DHS’s border security needs without squandering taxpayer money. “If you issue a waiver [to fast-track wall construction] that will not be possible,” the superintendents wrote. “The unique, nationally significant landscape, natural resources, and cultural heritage of Big Bend National Park, one of the nation’s crown jewels, will be irreparably damaged, and we fear that any sense of commitment to shared stewardship of the nation’s borderland between your agency and the one we devoted our careers to will be as well.”