A federal judge has stopped new border-barrier work across Texas’s Big Bend region, putting a broad set of environmental waivers on hold while a constitutional challenge proceeds.
US District Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a preliminary injunction after an evidentiary hearing on Friday. Her two-page order bars federal defendants from building barriers, roads or related infrastructure, and from undertaking ground-disturbing work in the Big Bend Sector, unless they comply with otherwise applicable law.
The order reaches construction in and around Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. It also stays the effect of three waivers that had displaced a long list of environmental and public-lands protections to accelerate the project. The court said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on at least one claim, faced serious and irreparable harm, and had shown that the equities and public interest favoured interim relief.
The plaintiffs include Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a conservation organisation and a local river guide and landowner. Their case argues that the executive branch cannot use waiver authority to sweep aside statutory protections and private-property interests on the scale proposed. The government maintains that barriers and patrol roads are needed to achieve operational control of the border, including in remote terrain with comparatively few vehicle crossings.
The injunction is preliminary. It does not resolve the legality of the project or decide the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims. Cardone said a fuller memorandum explaining the court’s reasoning will follow, and the order will remain in force until the court changes it.
The immediate legal effect is unusually clear: the waivers no longer provide a path around the laws they displaced, and construction cannot resume merely because an earlier administrative pause has expired. The underlying lawsuit will now determine whether that restriction becomes lasting or is narrowed on a fuller record.
