Largest Border Wall Contract in U.S. History Awarded for Potential Wall in Big Bend National Park
DHS awards $1.7 billion to Albuquerque-based industrial construction company for "border wall in Big Bend Texas, segment identified as BBT-4"
Just like in the image above, dark clouds are gathering above the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park.
Of all the stories I’ve written and updates I’ve shared about the increasingly insane Big Bend border wall saga, this is probably the biggest bombshell of them all.
About a week ago, top border official Rodney Scott said in an interview that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) wouldn’t build a physical wall in Big Bend National Park. According to CBP Commissioner Scott, they’d construct paved roads along the Rio Grande instead.
“Big Bend National Park has some just, like, unbelievably huge granite cliffs. It would be kind of silly to put like a 30-foot border wall on top of a 90-foot granite cliff,” Scott said. “So what we’re trying to convey is that we are going to have meaningful border security in that entire area.”
As “silly” as it is to put a 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall on top of cliffs and in some of the most remote and wildest country in the lower 48 states, it now appears that’s exactly what CBP intends to do after all.
This week, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract of $1.7 billion of our taxpayer money to the industrial construction company Southwest Valley Constructors Co.
That company is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a subsidiary of Kiewit Corporation, a Fortune 500 company. According to the government contracting website ExecutiveGov, Southwest Valley “has worked in the industrial, mining, oil, gas, [and] chemical, power, transportation, water, and building sectors for the United States government.”
It’s already worked on border walls in California, Arizona, and Texas, having secured billion-dollar-plus contracts under the first Trump administration in 2019 and 2020.
Now, however, the $1.7 billion contract it just got is of an entirely different magnitude, both in its scale and because of its location.
This is the biggest border wall contract ever awarded to a single company in American history.
This follows another recently awarded border wall contract in the region. In March, a $1.2 billion contact was awarded to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand & Gravel to build a physical wall in Presidio County and Big Bend Ranch State Park, which Big Bend Sentinel said “represents one of the largest contracts for border wall construction in U.S. history.” That project was estimated to cost $17 million per mile of road.
This new contract for Big Bend National Park is half a billion dollars more.
How do we know this contract is actually for a border wall in Big Bend National Park?
Because it literally says so: “AWARD OF CONSTRUCTION TASK ORDER FOR BORDER WALL IN BIG BEND TEXAS, SEGMENT IDENTIFIED AS BBT-4.”
BBT-4 is the section of border in the Big Bend Sector that runs through the national park.
Even though CBP’s ridiculously unreliable “Smart Wall App”—it’s a public gaslighting tool at this point—currently calls it “Technology & Patrol Road (No Wall),” the actual contract says the opposite.
Which do you believe is true?
“There’s no universe where a road costs $1.7 billion,” said Laiken Jordahl, National Public Lands Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity in a social media post.
Why are they still proceeding with this massively unpopular project?
Because, thanks to last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Customs and Border Protection has more money than they know what to do with. So, they’re currently awarding enormous contracts for construction in ridiculous places.
This is not about border security. This is about giving billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to administration-friendly companies.
In fact, last December, Customs and Border Protection itself bragged about how “Illegal border crossings in Big Bend Sector fall significantly in FY2025.” Apprehensions in the sector fell 74% compared with two fiscal years earlier, they boasted.
Let’s look at the CBP’s recent data.
This FY2026—from October through April—the total number of so-called “southwest land border encounters” is 76,568 so far. In the Big Bend Sector, which makes up 26% of the entire southern border, that number was a meager 1,236.
That’s 1.6% of all illegal border crossings in an area that’s more than a quarter of the entire border. In Big Bend National Park, thanks to its remoteness, ruggedness, and inaccessibility, that’s even less.
Just yesterday, I wrote about how the new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin waived dozens of environmental, conservation, and resource protection laws to fast-track a border barrier along the Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River. That’s just downstream from the national park.
I ended that article by saying that it “remains to be seen whether CBP will proceed to waiving environmental laws in the national park as well, which it will need to do in order to legally do any construction work there.”
With an actual contract now awarded to build a physical 30-foot steel bollard wall along the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park, those laws will need to be waived before Southwest Valley can start construction. That’s the necessary next step in this process.
The effects of this wall on the environment and the area’s tourism industry would be nothing short of catastrophic. This is a wall that would sever wildlife migration routes, cut off river access to both people and animals alike, remove campsites and trailheads, annihilate the park’s world-class night sky viewing, and cause massive pollution.
Camping on the banks of the Rio Grande is one of the greatest experiences Big Bend National Park has to offer. You can gaze across the last undeveloped section of border with Mexico—perhaps even forget, for just a brief minute, that there’s a border there at all. You can’t find that anywhere else. A border wall would eliminate most, if not all, riverside campgrounds, removing that unique experience forever.
Additionally, a physical wall in the area would end up killing hundreds of mammals like deer, black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, and javelinas who just happen to find themselves in the United States when the wall goes up and lose access to a reliable source of drinking water.
Border wall construction would also adversely affect bird habitat along the Rio Grande. Thanks to the national park’s varied topographies, cliffs, slopes, ridges, washes, and gullies, it has the second-highest bird diversity of all 63 national parks, as I analyzed in this national park biodiversity deep dive last year.
The intact riparian habitat along the Rio Grande is a crucial contributor to that as well. Only Grand Canyon National Park has more bird diversity than Big Bend National Park, for the same reason: varied topography and a river.
If you’d like to see what some of the actual effects for visitors would be, Matt Stahl, a Dallas-Forth Worth-based water resources engineer and frequent visitor to Big Bend, has created an amazing map of the area.
The interactive map shows the potential impact of a physical border wall in both Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park.
It displays 83 points of interest (POIs) for things like wildlife crossings, campsites, viewpoints, and light pollution.
Light pollution, for example, could extend 3 miles or even further from the wall, while the wall itself could be visible from 75% of those POIs, including from most of the southern half of the national park—even from trails that start at the Chisos Basin Visitor Center and Lodge.
“Part of my goal in creating this impact viewer was to create a worst-case scenario view of what a structural wall would mean for Big Bend National Park and neighboring Big Bend Ranch State Park,” Stahl told me in an email. “I hoped to channel the available information and quantify the impact in terms of visibility and animal migration and hydrologic processes like erosion and flooding.”
It’s important to note here, though, that Stahl’s map assumes that there will be a 30-foot steel border wall along the entire border through the parks. At the time of writing, it still remains entirely unclear if that’s actually the case—it may be select sections, it may be most of it, or it may be all of it. This is a great map to explore to get a sense of the potential worst-case impact, but keep that important caveat in mind. (Click/tap the image to use the map.)
“Even though a structural wall may not be fully built through every mile of the river corridor, the supporting infrastructure for laying electrical lines and constructing access roads will cause significant disruption to the natural habitat and the experience that visitors have when they come to visit and explore the Big Bend,” he added.
After months of virtually no reliable communication from CBP, including confusing updates of its wall map and one-off interviews, Stahl shared the frustration many people in the Big Bend area are feeling about the absence of transparency.
“The form that the wall will take is unclear. I am concerned and disappointed by the lack of transparency and communication about the proposed wall,” he said. “I am open to updating the impact viewer with additional scenarios, perhaps with a viewshed limited to 30-foot sensor posts at regular intervals, along with lighting from those sensor poles as well as access roads at least on the US side for maintenance and patrolling.”
“A vehicle barrier scenario could be another—this would likely be limited to the potential crossing locations that I show in the viewer based on slope, riparian corridors, other factors like road proximity.”
Two of the map’s strongest features are showing how visible a border wall would actually be from many locations in the parks, as well as how lighting would impact the area’s world-class night sky.
In fact, out of its 83 points of interest, the map identifies no fewer than 64 where a 30-foot border wall would be visible. From some locations, indicated in purple and pink on the map, you’d be able to see a border wall in more than 70 (!) places.
“The view from Emory Peak, the highest point in Big Bend National Park, is even clearer with a viewshed value of 81,” Stahl told me. In practice, that means that, when standing at the top of Emory, you’d see a 30-foot wall in 81 different places.
Take a second and picture that. After hiking 5.2 strenuous miles and climbing 2,500 vertical feet, your visual reward would be 81 different sections of border wall.
In the (cropped) image below, these two hikers enjoying the panoramic view from the South Rim would see miles and miles of border wall along the Rio Grande in the distance.
As impactful as a border wall would be on the daytime viewshed, it gets even worse after the sun goes down.
Currently, Big Bend National Park has the least light pollution of any national park site in the lower 48 states. The Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve covers more than 15,000 square miles and, according to the McDonald Observatory, “is the largest IDA-certified reserve in the world and the first to cross an international boundary.”
That international boundary is, of course, the Rio Grande, which, if this record-breaking $1.7 contract is ever executed, would be flanked by the wall and all its other infrastructure.
A border barrier, along with necessary roads, increased traffic, new lighting, and other monitoring equipment would destroy the stargazing experience or the area’s astro-tourism entirely.
The Big Bend National Park border wall contract has been awarded for a record amount. So, regardless of what the map shows or what the CBP Commissioner says, it’s clear that things are moving in the direction of destructive construction—which seems like a contradiction in terms, but is actually true in this absurd situation.
“The Department of Homeland Security can still reverse this decision. They can cancel these contracts and reinstate protections. Governor Abbott and Senators Cruz and Cornyn still have time to speak out against this assault on the wildest and most beloved public land in all of Texas,” Laiken Jordahl said.
“We won’t stop fighting for Big Bend. Millions of people are on our side. Our love for this land is more powerful than these corrupt politicians, these billionaire contractors, and the cold dead steel they want to put between us and the Rio Grande.”
How Can You Help Protect Big Bend?
If you care about Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, the Rio Grande itself, and the greater Big Bend area—all of which are at risk here—please keep the pressure on. Keep supporting the local organizations who are pushing back against this unpopular wall and other destructive infrastructure:
Follow them on social media and share their posts. Check out their advocacy resources. Support them with a donation if you can.
If you live in Texas yourself, contact your Senators and Representative. That includes both national and state politicians, even Governor Greg Abbott himself:
You can also use this super-easy 5calls.org script.
Another meaningful way to push back against the Big Bend border infrastructure, regardless of whether you live in Texas or elsewhere in the country, is adding your signature to this rapidly growing petition, which, at the time of writing, has amassed over 130,000 signatures.
Lastly, help spread the word. Share this article. Tell your friends, family, and neighbors about it. Post about protecting the Big Bend area’s unique character on social media.
Thanks for speaking up for our public lands and waters!
See you out there,
Bram
First photo: NPS / DDosedal
Second photo: NPS / Jennette Jurado
Third photo: NPS / T. Vandenberg
It is disgusting to even think of the damage this will cause to a beautiful national park. Border patrol folks don’t even think it is necessary. Of course our president has no conception of what he is doing.