Supreme Court clears the way for a border wall through Big Bend National Park

The five-page order that reopened a 517-mile construction zone

On Monday 9 November 2026, the United States Supreme Court cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to resume building border barriers through Big Bend National Park in West Texas, lifting a federal judge’s injunction that had halted the work for five weeks.

The decision came in an unsigned, five-page emergency order in Mullin v. Friends of the Ruidosa Church (No. 26A560). Eight justices voted to grant the government’s request; only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly dissented, saying she would have denied it, without explaining her reasoning.

The court said the government was “exceedingly likely to prevail” on its argument that the lower court lacked jurisdiction, and that the injunction “impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity”. The government’s interest, it wrote, “outweighs any aesthetic, recreational, and environmental harm”.

The ruling is a pause, not a verdict. It lifts the injunction while the lawsuit continues in the lower court, so construction can restart across the Big Bend Sector — 517 river miles, more than a quarter of the entire United States–Mexico border — including the 17-mile noncontiguous vehicle barrier planned inside the national park itself. The wall has been Trump’s signature promise since 2016, and the decision lands as he recalibrates his immigration message after the 2026 midterms, having told voters his deportation policy had been “too tough”.

The waivers, the judge and the numbers behind the case

The fight turns on waivers issued between February and July 2026 by two homeland security secretaries, Kristi Noem and her successor, Markwayne Mullin. Under Section 102 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, as amended in 2005, they set aside a broad slate of environmental and historic-preservation laws — including the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act — to speed barrier and road construction across the sector. The challengers say it is the first time such a slate has been swept aside inside a national park.

United States District Judge Kathleen Cardone, based in El Paso, blocked the construction on 2 October, issuing a written opinion on 14 October. She noted that while the Big Bend Sector covers more than 25 percent of the United States–Mexico border, it accounts for only 0.3 to 2.2 percent of migrant apprehensions. “Therefore, if the Big Bend Sector is an area of high illegal entry, so is every other sector,” she wrote. The government counters that agents recorded 89,000 apprehensions there from fiscal 2021 through 2025.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to intervene on 21 October. The administration says most of the planned 300-plus miles of barriers and roads will stand on privately owned land, with no 30-foot pedestrian wall inside the parks. Construction began in August, then stopped inside the park after bipartisan criticism; five contracts have been awarded, and the government told the court the stoppage costs more than $460,000 a day. The plaintiffs are the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church — defenders of a historic adobe church in Ruidosa, Texas — and a Big Bend river guide and landowner. The park shelters the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat.

What remains unanswered after the court’s order?

The order says construction may resume, but not when the crews return, or where first. Work inside the park was paused in August, and the pace there may turn as much on the homeland security department’s own choices as on the courts. Whether the 17-mile vehicle barrier keeps its planned shape is a decision the administration has yet to confirm in public.

The deeper legal question is untouched. The Supreme Court ruled on the likelihood of success and the balance of harms, not on whether the waivers themselves are lawful. The district court case continues on a full record, and the challengers’ argument — that the waivers lacked clear congressional authorisation and violated the major-questions doctrine — has not been decided. Nor is it known whether the Supreme Court will eventually take the case on the merits, or let the lower court’s eventual ruling stand.

Also unknown is how much landscape will be altered before any final judgment arrives. Barriers and roads, once built through desert and river country, are not easily undone, and the challengers have warned of permanent loss of protected wilderness that benefits tourism, recreation, farming, ranching, spirituality and education.

Why does a five-page order reach beyond one park?

Because the precedent travels further than the barrier. If waivers can set aside a broad slate of environmental and historic-preservation laws inside a national park, the same instrument can be used anywhere along the border where protected land stands in the way. Judge Cardone’s warning is the heart of the case: if this sector qualifies, the waiver power has no practical limit.

The ruling also narrows a doctrine the court itself has used to police executive power. The challengers argued the waivers raised a major question that Congress had never clearly authorised. The court answered that “there is no such thing as a ‘constitutional’ major-questions claim”, and that the 1996 law permits district courts to hear only claims alleging a violation of the Constitution.

And the politics cut across party lines. The project drew bipartisan criticism in August, and on the very day of the ruling the Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas published an opinion article in the San Antonio Express-News titled “The Case Against the Big Bend Border Wall”. The legal front against the administration keeps widening, as Democrats flipped five attorney general offices in Republican states in the same election cycle.

The court chose speed over scrutiny, for now

Emergency-docket rulings are exercises in prediction, and this one is unusually candid about it. The court did not decide that the waivers are lawful. It decided that the government is “exceedingly likely” to win on a threshold question — whether a district judge may even hear this kind of challenge — and that, while the case is argued, the harm of delay outweighs the harm of building.

The jurisdictional reading is the ruling’s sharpest edge. The 1996 law channels challenges to waiver decisions away from the ordinary courts, leaving district judges only constitutional claims. By holding that a major-questions claim is not a constitutional claim, the court closed the door the challengers had walked through — and made it harder for any future litigant to use the major-questions doctrine against a border waiver.

The 8-1 vote signals broad agreement on the emergency posture rather than on the underlying waiver power. Politically, the decision hands the administration a practical win it has sought since August, when criticism from both parties forced a pause inside the park. It also arrives in a changed landscape: the president has begun softening his immigration rhetoric, and Congress — where a bitter showdown looms — holds the power to rewrite the 1996 waiver authority altogether. The court has spoken about speed; the legislature has not yet spoken about the power itself.

What the ruling sets in motion beyond the courtroom

First, construction creates facts that no later judgment can easily reverse. Roads and barriers cut through desert, canyon and river country, and the park’s ecology — the bat colonies, the migration corridors, the fragile riverside habitat — absorbs the change long before a judge rules on the merits. Even a challenger victory would arrive after the landscape has been altered.

Second, the waiver template is now road-tested. The department has learned that a non-constitutional challenge to a Section 102 waiver will struggle to find a courtroom at all, and other border sectors — with their own parks, refuges and tribal lands — are the obvious next candidates. The precedent is not limited to Texas: it is a manual for building through protected ground anywhere the secretary designates an area of high illegal entry.

Third, the challengers’ strategy must change. With the district-court route narrowed, environmental groups will look to constitutional claims, to Congress and to public pressure. For the riverside landowners, the Ruidosa church and the Lipan Apache community, the question is now how close the wall comes and what it severs.

What happens now that the injunction is lifted?

The homeland security department can restart construction immediately, and the first sign to watch is whether crews return inside Big Bend National Park or to the 300-plus miles of barriers and roads planned elsewhere in the sector. The department’s own statements — that no 30-foot wall is planned inside the park — will be tested against what actually rises there.

The lawsuit continues in the El Paso district court on a full record, and the challengers can still press their claims. A merits ruling against the waivers remains possible. Until then, the wall advances while the law catches up.