Trending
COMSTOCK, Texas -- The Trump administration has started building the border wall through a west Texas section of the Big Bend region, marking the first major construction in an area of the U.S.-Mexico border where the administration's plans have met heavy opposition.
The start of construction marks an important milestone in the administration's $46 billion plan to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology as it seeks to make good on a key campaign promise by President Donald Trump to finish the wall. And it comes as Customs and Border Protection says it has doubled the pace at which it is building the wall across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to The Associated Press that "border wall panel installation is underway" in a 47-mile stretch of Hudspeth County in west Texas known as Big Bend 1. There are a total of five project areas that make up the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region stretching from an area of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.
CBP said the first panels were erected on September 15. On a map on the agency's website where the agency posts updates of wall construction across the entire southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel wall panels into place while construction workers looked on.
The new activity was separate from a border infrastructure project in the nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has temporarily suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.
Activist plan to keep up their fight
In the broader Big Bend region of Texas, CBP has run up against concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who say the remote region isn't a high-traffic area for illegal immigration.
Activists said Friday they would continue opposing the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even as the panels were being installed.
Clara Benson, one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition which has been fighting against CBP's plans, said in an interview Friday that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and that contractors had been clearing yards to stage supplies.
But speaking from Washington, D.C. where she and others in the coalition were meeting with lawmakers, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.