Big Bend National Park Area to Get a ‘Smart Wall’ Border to Safeguard From Illegal Activities

Stretching for 220 miles along the Gulf of Mexico, a southern belt overlays the canvas of Florida, shaped just like a dinosaur's tail. Hugging this belt is a terrain of rugged Chisos mountains, peppered with evolving coastal marshes, feminine mangrove forests, and lush seagrass meadows. However, like thieves secretly intruding inside a royal castle, this region, called “Big Bend,” is also a backdoor for illegal larceners. In 2024 alone, Big Bend National Park’s border became a sweeping breach for around 2,900 illegal migrants and smugglers who bootlegged more than 9,100 lbs of drugs. To protect the border line against these blagging intrusions, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have made a “plan.”

Announced by President Trump, the “Smart Wall” plan involves fortressing the borders of the Big Bend with heightened surveillance-driven security. This border surveillance technology will be implemented with the funds procured from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” according to the announcement. The department has received a funding contract amounting to $4.5 billion, which they will utilize to build hundreds of miles of barriers and high-tech monitoring systems across the Southwest border of the Greater Big Bend Region in Texas.

This state-of-the-art “border barrier system” will include a combo of primary and secondary steel Hollard wall, waterborne barriers, patrol roads, and the essential “detection technology” required to tie all these pieces together, like surveillance cameras and lights. On its website, CBP has also shared a “smart wall map” that illustrates multiple segments of the project planned for this region. And although Big Bend is not highlighted in particular, media reports and officials’ statements suggest that it is one of the main areas where this plan is set to be executed.

According to CBP, the plan will add 230 miles of Smart Wall and nearly 400 miles of new technologies to the region. The 363-mile section will become part of the 535 miles of Big Bend’s border, which will be further patrolled by detection technology gadgets, given its unfavorable terrain and remoteness.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem believes that the plan needs to be executed as quickly as possible to fortify the region against illegal activities. In an October 15 statement, said that there is "an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries." Some of the usual rules and regulations applicable to construction have been waived for this project.

The plan, however brilliant, has not been received without a backlash. Russ McSpadden, southwest conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “previous wall construction across the southern border impacted the habitats of nearly 100 threatened and endangered species,” per FOX 4 News. "Decades of ecological research show that walls fragment habitats, block migrations, sever gene flow, and destabilize wildlife populations. A continent-wide wall would splinter ecosystems, bisect wildlife populations, and push many species toward extinction.”

McSpadden grunted. Despite the counterarguments, Noem and the involved professionals will continue to implement the Smart Wall plan, believing that Big Bend is the terrain of “high illegal entry,” and if this backdoor is not fortressed against the encroachers, its much-worshipped beauty could soon turn into a melting pot of shady smugglers, reckless migrants, and drug-mongers.

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