The Trump administration has waived a slew of environmental and historical preservation laws that would allow it to build a towering border wall that cuts through Big Bend national park, a vast protected wilderness in south Texas.
Congress poured a whopping $46.5bn for border wall construction into the “Big, Beautiful” bill last year, supercharging Donald Trump’s ambition to wall off the southern border with Mexico. The longest unwalled stretches lie along a roughly 500-mile (800km) section of west Texas that Customs and Border Protection calls the “Big Bend sector”.
