Supreme Court Lifts Order Blocking Trump's Big Bend Border Wall

The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can resume building a border wall through the Big Bend region of West Texas. The justices voted 8-1 on Monday to lift a federal judge’s order that had stopped construction across the sector for more than a month. The unsigned five-page decision said a 1996 immigration law gives the Homeland Security secretary wide room to waive environmental rules and that Congress wrote it to favor fast construction over the harm the challengers described. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one who said she would have turned the administration down. She did not explain why. Crews can now return to work across the roughly 500-mile project area, where the government has planned more than 300 miles of barriers, patrol roads, and surveillance equipment, including inside Big Bend National Park. The administration has said it will not build a large wall within the park itself. The fight started in February, when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed the first of three waivers covering the Big Bend sector. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, signed the other two. The Center for Biological Diversity sued to stop the work, joined by a nonprofit that preserves a historic border church and a Terlingua river guide who owns land in the region. Opposition grew in August after bulldozers were spotted clearing desert inside the national park, and U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone shut everything down on October 2. The administration went to the Supreme Court last month and said Cardone had no authority to second-guess the waivers. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that an unwalled gap in the Big Bend would pull cartels and other bad actors into the opening once barriers went up everywhere else. Mullin had designated the sector an area of high illegal entry, pointing to roughly 89,000 apprehensions and large drug seizures there across fiscal years 2021 through 2025. Cardone found that Congress likely never authorized waivers that sweeping in the sector that records the fewest crossings anywhere on the southern border. Outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) published an op-ed against the project in the San Antonio Express-News on Monday, hours ahead of the ruling. He wrote that better technology, more agents, and real cooperation with local officials and landowners would serve Texas more sensibly than building barriers he described as unnecessary and indiscriminate. Tangle founder and executive editor Isaac Saul, who owns property in the region, claimed the wall there would be “one of the stupidest things the federal government has ever done.” Saul also said illegal crossings have fallen to record lows and that President Donald Trump deserves the credit for it. Monday’s order is temporary. It stays in force until the justices decide whether to take the case, or until the El Paso court resolves the lawsuit.