Trump Wants to Bulldoze Big Bend. He’s Already Looted the Rest of the Park System.
The national park barely sees any border crossings. But that's not the point.
There’s a particular kind of quiet in Big Bend National Park that can be hard to find anywhere else in the Lower 48.
It’s the hushed Chihuahuan Desert at night where the Milky Way seems close enough to touch, the surprising breeze at the summit of Emory Peak, and the power of the Rio Grande cutting through limestone canyons that took millions of years to carve. It’s one of the least-visited, least-crowded, most genuinely wild places the National Park Service protects.
And that’s precisely why Donald Trump has been trying to blow it up.
Last week, bulldozers rolled into Big Bend to begin clearing land for more than 100 miles of border wall, part of a Homeland Security plan spanning the entire 517-mile sector. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived 28 environmental and historic preservation laws, skipping the pesky process that would actually review what they’re about to destroy.
Conservationists warn the mountainous terrain will likely require blasting — the same “blasting in roads” tactic already used on similar wall segments in Arizona. Big Bend’s famous dark skies, one of the last truly unpolluted views of the stars east of the Rockies, will get construction floodlights. The wildlife corridors that make the park a vital ecological crossroads would be upended as crews descend to pour miles of concrete.
Amid intense local protests, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection head on Monday finally announced the agency is “pausing” the wall’s construction.
But here’s the thing about Big Bend: it barely sees any border crossings (beyond hikers who want to enjoy a bit of respite from the sweltering heat in the charming village of Boquillas del Carmen). CBP recorded just 734 people stopped in the entire Big Bend sector this fiscal year — under 3% of all southern border encounters nationwide. Ronny Dodson, the Democratic Brewster County Sheriff, says crossings in his county are already down roughly 90% since the border closure, and his office has caught exactly one smuggler in three months.
Even local Republicans think this is insane. Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland calls the canyons “a God-made barrier” and wants surveillance technology instead of concrete. County Judge Greg Henington put it more bluntly: “The terrain itself is a wall. We don’t have a problem with monitoring the border. The volume’s not very high.”
This isn’t border security. It’s a wrecking ball looking for a reason to swing, wielded by an administration that waived the law in hopes that no one could stop it in time (to that end there is a lawsuit, but the courts haven’t blocked construction). It’s the Trump regime’s governing blueprint that we’ve seen over and over again, from DOGE killing USAID to border agents slaying Americans in our streets.
And let’s be clear: you can’t separate the damage they want to do to Big Bend from the violence against those the wall is supposedly being built to keep out. Trump’s deportation machine has now killed more people in ICE custody than at any point in two decades — 29 deaths since October alone, breaking the previous record of 28 set in 2004, with detention numbers higher than at any point since the agency was created. One of those deaths at a facility in El Paso was ruled a homicide.
These are not abstractions. They are people who died in mass cages. What should frighten us all is that Stephen Miller (and Trump’s other henchmen) have meticulously studied and learned from his first term, which was still a human rights horror show. So they’ve been able to carry out their cruel and violent anti-immigration agenda with devastating efficiency, often by bulldozing the law — just like they’re trying to demolish one of our most treasured national parks.
I’ve written before about what this administration is doing to the national parks system — how Trump swapped Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth off the free-admission calendar to make room for his own birthday, DOGE taking a chainsaw to ranger staffing, and a president who can’t be bothered to pronounce Yosemite correctly while gutting the agency that runs it.
Big Bend is the same story with bulldozers instead of budget cuts.
But it’s also the clearest illustration yet of Trump’s bigger scam. He doesn’t see the National Park Service as a public trust. He sees it as just another slush fund for his vanity projects and fascist agenda.
Why You Shouldn’t Visit Our National Parks Today
Susan J. Demas is Lincoln Square’s Executive Editor and a 25-year journalism veteran. Subscribe to her Substack.
Look at where the money is actually going. Big Bend is on the verge of being dynamited and the broader Park Service has hemorrhaged roughly a quarter of its permanent workforce — close to 2,000 employees gone in a single year. But Trump has funneled $423 million into White House grounds and National Mall projects in 2026 alone, up from $7.5 million in 2024.
That’s not a typo. The 80-year-old president has rerouted taxpayer dollars from the agency that protects wild lands in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, and Rocky Mountain (where I was just hiking for the last week) toward pet projects to stroke his ego, acting like a man running out of time. Meanwhile, the parks are languishing with a $30 billion maintenance backlog (per his own Interior Secretary) that Trump has shown zero interest in fixing. I thought about that a lot while waiting in massive lines to enter the park and get advice from rangers at the visitor center.
“The National Park Service is being used as a piggy bank for Trump’s vanity projects,” Tim Whitehouse of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility told Meidas Touch. “One man’s whims have usurped the nation’s legitimate priorities,” added Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, “by creating risks at historically and culturally significant places that were not at risk and ignoring significant and irreplaceable places that are actually threatened.”
You can see exactly what that looks like at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where a $16 million renovation has become a national embarrassment (the no-bid contracts predictably resulted in peeling blue sealant and algae blooms).
Trump’s response wasn’t to admit his hand-picked contractors screwed up, of course. It was to blame vandals. Federal prosecutors actually filed felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn before quietly dropping them on July 31 (and admitting the damage came from “bungled installation,” not sabotage). The feds also scrapped misdemeanor charges against three others, leaving Trump to fume that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.”
Meanwhile, park rangers who are supposed to be protecting wilderness are increasingly deployed as ornamental security for the National Mall and Reflecting Pool. They’ve been reduced to a taxpayer-funded honor guard serving the president’s megalomania, instead of fulfilling their duties as stewards of public lands open to all.
In a scathing column in the Denver Post, former superintendent Bill Wade declared, “Never — not once in decades — have I witnessed such systematic degradation of the National Park Service under the thumb of President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.”
This comes down to what Trump believes the government is for. And it’s not about public lands, the rule of law, or even the border security he claims to care about. Government exists to glorify him, from his $600 million White House ballroom to the National Parks pass emblazoned with his image next to George Washington. And it exists so that Trump, his family, and his cronies can profit handsomely from it, while the functions Americans rely on — from our military to roads to national forests — are left to rot or blown apart.
Big Bend could be ravaged for a hideous wall that will stop almost no one from crossing over. The Reflecting Pool gets a botched $16 million facelift while rangers get pink slips. An innocent man was charged with a felony so the president can save face. This is what America is under Trump, where he repeatedly strips the public good for parts and dares anyone to stop him.
They’re betting most of us won’t notice until the Texas desert they destroyed is gone for good. Don’t let them be right.
You could make the case that Trump is actually 'allergic to' natural beauty, as well as infuriated by anyone or anything he cannot exploit for cash, praise, or other narcissistic goods. When you combine that with his well-documented sadism, this is what you get. I keep thinking of both Secretary of Sate Rex Tillerson and Chief of Staff General Mattis (sp?). Each man, one from industry and one from the military described Trump as the worst human being he had met. As well as, in TIllerson's case, calling him an 'effing moron.' Hmm, let's see. What do you get when your cross moral turpitude with ignorance and apparently unrestrained power? A threat to humanity.
Thank you for highlighting this. For those of us who love and regularly visit our National Parks, this is devastating to watch. Corruption and destruction.