Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Bulldozing a National Park for His Border Wall

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Tim Miller sits down with Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle, to discuss Donald Trump’s plans to build a border wall through and around Big Bend National Park in West Texas. Saul explains why local residents, business owners, sheriffs, and even some Trump-supporting officials are pushing back against the project. Tim and Isaac discuss the environmental damage from construction, the enormous $19.4 billion cost for the new border barriers, and the surprising possibility that new roads and infrastructure could actually make it easier for migrants to navigate the area.Read more from Isaac’s work at Tangle: https://www.readtangle.com/author/isaac-saul/

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the board. I'm Tim Miller. I delighted to welcome back, founder of Tangle, an independent, nonpartisan politics newsletter. You can find it at readtangle.com. It's Isaac Saul. What's up, man? How you doing, Tim? I wanted to grab you, because you sent a pretty powerful tweet earlier this week about what's happening in Big Bend. It started with bulldozers and heavy equipment arrived in Big Bend National Park today. Trump's border wall is coming, as you always do. Had a lot of facts in it, a lot of supporting data. And it was, it was supposed to. stuff that I just realized I didn't know or had forgotten or was not fully read in on. And so I was like, man, I think it's really important that we talk about this. But I just want to start here. Like, I thought you were from the Northeast. The tweet made it seem like you're living in Big Bend. So I just made it part of Square One. Like where, where, which part of Texas is Big Ben?

Where are you? Where do you live? Yeah. So I am, I'm full time in, uh, in, in New Jersey. I've been living in Pennsylvania for a while. But I have a property and a home in Big Ben. that I'm seasonal in in the wintertime. And my family is all from there, actually, in West Texas.

So my cousins, aunts, uncles, I grew up going there and living there in the summer, working for them starting at the age of 13 when I was about 23, 24 years old. I bought the dirt cheap piece of property, 10 acres, right outside the National Park. And for the last 10 or 15 years, I've been building, saving money, building on it, built an adobe house on it and go down there with my family and spend time there. So, yeah, I'm not there full time, but a lot of routes there and spend a lot of time there in the, winter season. For people who aren't, you know, deep in the geography of West Texas, like, I'm painting this picture of like this, what is Big Bend National Park? Like, is this, you know,

where exactly in Texas is this between, you know, what cities kind of like, can describe the land that they're building the wall on? Yeah. So the closest big city, to Big Bend is El Paso, which is about four and a half, five hour drive, if you're moving pretty well, northwest of where Big Bend National Park is. So this is southwest Texas. I mean, people call it West Texas, but it's sort of on the southern side of West Texas. And it is the most remote, most pristine land in the lower 48. I mean, that is frequently how it is described. It runs along the Rio Grande River, which is the water barrier that separates the United States and Mexico. And the national park down there is incredible. I mean, it's a hotbed for hiking. It is a place with some of the best river

rafting in the country. People go there to camp and stargaze. The dark skies in West Texas are literally world-renowned if you want to look into the galaxies. There are so few lights and light pollution in the surrounding area that West Texas and Big Ben in particular is one of the best places to do it in the entire world right here in the United States. So in Texas, it's considered a gem. I mean, among environmentalists, campers, hunters, outdoorsmen, outfitters, it is one of the most treasured parts of the state. And it's because it is really truly genuinely unique. I mean, it's possible to find this kind of remoteness and untouched kind of land in places like Alaska and Montana, but it is incredibly rare in the United States and very, very rare in Texas.

The prompting of this, though, is the, is the, is the building of a wall through the National Park. Talk about, like, why they're doing that, why you're objecting to it. I mean, you're usually playing it down the middle. Like what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, the, the reason why they're doing it is because President Trump ran in 2016 on building a 2,000-mile contiguous wall along the southwestern border of the United States. And he's trying to fulfill that promise, whether it makes sense or not. And I think that is the fundamental story here, is that there isn't really rationale for this,

aside from the fact that Trump said he was going to do it and he's trying to follow through on that promise to do it, which for the people who want a border wall or maybe don't understand why a border wall is quite silly here, that might sound pretty good. good, but I think for most people who care about rational, smart, intelligent public policy, it's a really bad reason to do something like this. So there are a few things here to note. One is that the border wall is incredibly, incredibly disliked in this part of the country. And this is an area with a lot of Trump voters. The border down in West Texas is actually quite mixed politically. So we've had Republican County judges, Republican sheriffs, Republican Border Patrol agents

coming out saying, this is a bad idea, we don't need this. What we actually need in this area is technology. Because the big issue in most border places where there's a lot of crossing is that there's a city on the U.S. side and there's a city on the Mexico side. People come to the city on the Mexico side. They cross over and then they disappear into the city on the U.S. side. In Big Ben, you don't have that. This is, as I described earlier, one of the most rural places in the lower 48. It is incredibly hard to traverse. People don't cross. You're nine hours from McAllen. I was like, me or McAllen. It's like, no. You're five hours from the closest airport. People cross this area. If they get to the U.S. side, they are, I mean, literally collapsing on the border and asking for help. These aren't

people who are running away and disappearing into Los Angeles. There is nowhere to go. There is nowhere to hide. So what Border Patrol agents want and what they have in this area is technology. They want motion sensors. They want cameras that alert them when somebody crosses the border. And then they have a long, long time to go find the people who set off those alerts because there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to run. There's nowhere to hide. Most of these Border Patrol stations are an hour, two hours, three hours away from some of the places in Big Ben that even experience any crossings. and when they get a little tech alert, they can get in their cars, drive down to where they got the alert, and then they go find the people who, again, by then, are typically just there to turn themselves in.

They either get deported or, you know, they apply for asylum and go into the system. But one of the big things about Big Bend is that it is an incredibly, incredibly unusual place for people to cross because it is so, so desolate. It's so hard to survive the journey. and because, you know, Trump wants to put into 30-foot border wall here, there are 1,000-foot sheer cliffs in basically every direction. I mean, the Santa Elena Canyon that runs through Big Bend National Park literally has cliffs that are 500, 750, 1,200 feet tall. So a 30-foot border wall is not going to make it any harder for somebody to cross the river here. It's already basically impassable.

And the data bears this out. The Big Ben region of the CBBB, sector is 25% of the U.S.-Mexico border. And in the last fiscal year, it accounted for 0.045% of border crossings. Okay? So it is practically nothing in the grand scheme of the sorts of things that the Trump administration says that they're worried about. And instead of solving this problem with the things that Border Patrol agents and local sheriffs are asking for, many of whom support,

strong borders. They want border security. They want to catch illegal immigrants. Instead of giving them the technology that they want or putting a little money into adding some agents in the area, they're building this massive wall. And a wall requires roads. And roads require water. And water requires drilling wells in the desert. And then you're going to put up lights that are going to disrupt the dark skies that attract tourists. And then you're going to need fences for the walls that block off people from the river, which is the only water source in the area, also happens to be a place where outfitters are running river trips. So now you're impacting the $100 million tourist business that exists in Big Ben. And so you have business owners who hate the wall. You have sheriffs who

hate the wall. You have Border Patrol agents who hate the wall. You have local residents who hate the wall. And yet the administration is basically ignoring all of them. And this week, bulldozers arrived in Big Ben National Park. And as if it couldn't get any crazier, Right now, currently, they are clearing the way for roads in Big Bend National Park that literally run parallel to already existing roads in the park. So the quote unquote patrol roads that they're destroying 100-year-old cactus plants and disrupting all this wildlife and basically desecrating this pristine American treasure, they're doing it for pretty much no reason because there's a road right next to where they could be driving that is so. big in this vast, huge national park that the Border Patrol agents could just drive up and down on that road as they do now. But instead, they've given a billion dollars to contractors who are coming in and building these quote unquote patrol roads, which then will require vehicle barriers,

which will mean walls along the roads to protect the roads, to protect the CBP agents. Is there any reason for that besides not construct some corruption gambet they want to give the contract to somebody? Like, what would be the reason? Yeah, and we'll get to the contracts in a minute because that is really the cherry on top. But no, the reason is that there are tourists who drive on the roads that run through the park, the pave roads that run through the park, and CBP saying that they want their own roads for Border Patrol vehicles, which, again, the roads are accessing all the same lands that many of the existing roads already do. You can look at a map of where CBP is running these roads, and right next to them are existing roads in the park

that I've driven on a million times that Border Patrol agents already use. I mean, it is totally nonsensical. What about the construction of the wall itself? And you said they're having bulldozers. Like, what are they bulldozing down there? Like, what is the wall going to go through, you know, as far as what the train is now? Well, this is one of the really interesting things about what's happening down there is that, you know, DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen has said in interviews with News Nation and Fox News,

that the administration is trying to be quieter about the things that they're doing because they had been drawing a lot of attention like they were with the raids in Minnesota or some of the border wall building that they did in Arizona. So this time they're basically taking on a new strategy where they're not answering any question. So the superintendents of the National Park don't know exactly what kind of barriers are going up in the park. The DHS has published stuff on their website, but it changes basically every week. The local sheriff, have no idea what's coming up in the park. The Border Patrol agents aren't talking to anybody. DHS representatives aren't showing up for community meetings where business owners and outfitters and

local residents who live next to where the map says a wall is going to go or where vehicle barriers are going to go want to know what's actually happening. They're just literally not answering any of the question. So we've heard, and what the DHS website says is that there's going to be 17 miles of some kind of vehicle barrier. They're claiming it's not going to be 30 foot steel ballard walls, but the vehicle barriers are six foot tall walls that are, you know, effectively going to require the same kind of construction and maintenance, which then means, you know, little houses that are 20 by 20 foot that have electricity running into them that require water, that are going to house the border

patrol agents to sit there, all these things that they could just accomplish by putting up a pole with a flock camera on it. They're going to build walls. We don't like clock cameras in most places, but maybe one here. Trust me. A lot of people on the border would prefer that right now. And outside the park running into Big Bend National Park, where a lot of the land is just as pristine as it is in the park,

there are plans for those 30-foot steel-ballered walls that are six inches apart. And the cost for those walls right now is running about $17 to $20 million a mile, which for what it's worth, $20 million, and this is not a joke, is literally more money than some of the towns on the border have for their entire annual budget. I mean, they're spending that on a single mile of wall that they could be putting into a local sheriff's department or a border patrol group to add agents or add technology or, I don't know, you know, do something crazy like fun health care or new roads in actual towns that need this sort of cash. But instead, they're spending that kind of money on a single mile of border wall in a place

where nobody crosses and nobody wants it. Even the people who live there, you know, I mean, that's the really crazy thing is like, there are conservatives who live in this part of the country who want strong borders who want security and they're vehemently against this wall. Tala Rico had an event last month with Thadius Cleveland who's a Trump supporting sheriff, Logan Sheriff, Fraterall County, you know, where he was expressing, basically what you've been expressing. And just the, like, Thaddeus Cleveland is a great example. I mean, this is a guy to just paint the picture. This is like big, classic West Texas, Cal boy, gun-totent sheriff, very maga. This is a Dutton Ranch character. And he is a wonderful guy and he's a smart guy and he does his job and he takes his work seriously.

His Twitter feed is literally him posting pictures of himself capturing illegal immigrants, people crossing the border. And he's vehemently opposed to this wall because what he's saying is we're about to destroy this huge source of the economy for this entire region, which is Big Ben National Park. We're going to destroy this sacred land that as somebody who's an environment. and a hunter he actually cares about. And we're going to do it all in the name of border security when I, Thaddeus Cleveland, a sheriff whose entire job is capturing border crossers can tell you

the wall is not going to help. One of the ironies of this whole thing, because this area is so impassable, is that they're about to build walls, access roads, paved areas through the park, paved areas outside the park in places where there were previously nothing but cactus, cliffs, and rivers. So it is literally, and this is not a joke, literally going to be easier for people to get across the border and traverse the border on the American side if they can get around the wall, which a lot we know from Arizona and California, many of these migrants do. They dig under it. They throw ladders over it.

But now when they get to the United States, instead of being stuck in one of the most desolate deserts in America, they're going to have roads, pathways, fences, shelter, places to go, water sources. I mean, they're literally going to have an easier time getting into the United States and escaping border detection if they can get around the wall, which is why people like Thaddeus Cleveland are saying, no, no, no, no, no. What we want is more cameras, more motion sensors, maybe more border patrol agents, but the border is secure. Zero point four or five percent of the people who are crossing the border are crossing it in Big Ben sector right now. I mean, it's crazy. Some relevant kind of in other areas. It's worth for this. Just like the ineffectiveness of the wall at times.

You wrote this. A few miles upstream, the first border barriers the administration erected were washed away in the first flood of the season, not even a bad one. Hundreds of millions of dollars wasted literally floating down the Rio Grande and the Washington Post story about all this. They said apparently we're starting to build a second wall across much of Arizona and New Mexico where there were similar issues. Yeah, because it turns out that giant orange buoys that are designed to keep people out of a river are susceptible to being washed down the river by a flood. Also, if you build a wall, even if it's made of steel bollards or razor wire and it's on the banks of a river and that river floods, Mother Nature is kind of going to do its thing and take it.

that stuff downstream. So in places like Eagle Pass, human beings literally can't go into the river now. Like Americans can't go into the river because it's just razor wire and debris. They can't go rafting. They can't go fishing. Cattle ranchers can't go into the river to get water. I mean, this is like a really important natural resource for people who live in Texas. And they're not just boxing Americans out of it. By the way, estimate, but just using the math and looking at acreage of the map, according to DHS, of where the wall is going to be, the acreage that will now be on the Mexico side. It looks like they're about to basically put Americans on the other side of 280,000 acres of Texas land. So Americans are going to be fenced out. We're giving some land

to Mexico? We're giving 280,000 acres of land and the most important water source in West Texas to Mexico. I mean, that is what Donald Trump is doing. If you talk to people down there on the border. That's what they'll tell you. My family. Territorial concessions to Mexico was happening? Yeah. Territorial concessions to Mexico. My family has a ranch, hundreds of acres of land in West Texas that's been in the family

for five, six generations, that they just got an eminent domain letter for from the federal government so they can come down there and put a wall straight through their land and boxed them off of acres and acres of their own land, which has the river access. again, the water source in West Texas in the desert that they won't be able to get to if the federal government gets this land. I mean, this is the stuff that's happening. You're saying if, are there, is there any path to stopping this? I mean, like right now, I was ranting earlier this week about how the Democrats in Congress are apparently just going to pass a CR with the Republicans without fighting for anything between now and the end of the year. I mean, is there conceivably, could the next Congress stop funding for this to put, you know, delays? Like, what, what if I, if I wanted to construct. hope. These are the kinds of things that I would say. First of all, they had to waive a ton of environmental laws. Congress had to waive a bunch of environmental laws and DHS had to waive a bunch of environmental laws to get this done. Right now, Texas has two Republican senators. They have a

Republican governor. So there isn't a ton of political will to stand up to Donald Trump from the Republican Party in Texas right now. That being said, Brandon Herrera, who is a diehard MAGA guy, a big gun-totent Maga-Bro, who basically has burst onto the Twitter social media scene by being as sycophantic about Trump as he could possibly be, who's running to replace Tony Gonzalez, who left Congress, who is the representative for this area. He is vehemently opposed to the wall. So even him, even somebody like him who understands this region, knows it despite all of his Trump-Pred elections, he's saying he's going to come into Congress and fight for people on the

border and try and stop DHS from building this wall in places it shouldn't be. So he's somebody who maybe there's some hope. There are some lawsuits filed already and some lawsuits being filed from what I'm hearing in September where people are going to try and slow things down. But I mean, so far the Trump administration is just waiving environmental laws. They're barreling forward. They're getting people, you know, man camps are getting set up. Hundreds of people are showing up on the border.

The contractors have billions of dollars to come in and construct this stuff. deals are already done and the federal government's already paying them that money. So I think it's going to be really, really hard to slow it down. But certainly the November election could have an impact and maybe there is a lawsuit that can come forward that will maybe grind things to a whole. But currently it's pretty bleak, to be totally honest with you. You're on the rare YouTube channel where people care about the federal budget. So I'm going to talk about this really quick. So the construction firms hired for this project in the first six months of 2020. DHS awarded more than 19.4 billion in contracts, which is like 10x, which is what was being

proposed in the first term, basically a little under that. And that is unimaginable, like 19.4 billion to do something that's totally unnecessary, net harmful and not going to achieve any of the stated objectives. Yeah. And by the way, you know, the people who are. being awarded those contracts. One of them, Barnard Construction, the guy who runs that construction firm, Tim Barnard, he donated over a million dollars to Trump's campaign. His reward for that was a construction project for his company, Barnard Constructions, to come in and build this wall.

Fisher Sand and Gravel, they're the company that's in Big Bend helping build the wall and, you know, blast new roads and bouldos and whatever. One of the people at the top of that company, not a joke was literally one of the guys who was indicted and found guilty with Steve Bannon for crowdsourcing border wall funding and then spending it on themselves and, you know, a bunch of luxury items for him and his buddy. So these are the people that the federal government is giving billions of dollars to come down to this region and build a wall in a place where nobody wants it and it's not actually going to do anything to help border security. One other thing I saw you post about that's just unrelated is why.

have you because I think it's relevant to your brand and what you're trying to do at Tangle News, since it's the exact opposite of it. We have a continuing proliferation of fake news, like actually fake news sites by political campaigns. Democrats don't get a pass on this one. Democrats are doing this. They have fake sites where it's like, we're the Altoona Gazette or whatever, and it's just like Democratic campaign committee talking about how great their candidates are. some of these sites have varying degrees of deception some of them are just straight propaganda

others of them they hire they do hire some local people and then like mix in political stuff but there's a new report this week about a wave of Republican efforts in all the big Senate states to put up fake news sites like how do you like talk to people about navigating that and like this is kind of the big question of of reedangle like how do you get good

information to people no matter what their political ideology is when you got this kind of thing out there. It's really tough and it's getting harder, especially because websites like this look pretty legit. I mean, you can tell somebody, hey, if you're watching an Instagram influencer or a YouTube channel, you know, don't take one person's word for it. A lot of these people don't have editors. They don't have fact checkers. There's no team behind the content. It's just one person kind of bloviating and you should not take everything they say 100% literally. But these websites that are popping up, they look like news websites. and you actually have to go to their about page or Google the website and look them up to learn

that, oh, they're backed by this weird Democratic-sounding super PAC or this weird Republican-sounding super PAC. And that really is the only suggestion that I can offer people is if you find yourself consuming news from a source that you found for the first time online and they're publishing something that you are taking as truth and as reality, it's worth. taking two minutes just to look in to that news organization. I mean, sometimes you'll find that they're an English language news organization being funded by the Chinese Communist Party. That's something that's happened to me online before with a website I didn't recognize. And I was like,

oh, that's crazy. This looked like a really legit news article. And I go look at their Wikipedia page and they're actually a foreign back, you know, state arm of the Chinese government. This kind of stuff is getting more and more common online. And it's just work. worth two minutes for any news source that you're putting any time into consuming to just do a quick basic 101 search, find their Wikipedia page, look it up. You can look them up on websites like all sides.com or ad fontes to see what their bias rating is to get more information about what backers financially are behind the news organization. But yeah, I mean, it actually requires a little bit of work, which a lot of people don't necessarily want to do while they're scrolling social media,

which is one of the scary things about how it works. I mean, the Democratic and Republican political donors who are backing these websites are doing it because they think it works. And I think that they're probably right. Yeah. Well, if you get an ad from a site that looks unfamiliar and it looks like a news site, like here are the ones, the Republican ones are things like Peach State Post. One thing you can do in addition to that and just helping yourself out is you can click a little three dots there on Google. or on wherever you're seeing the ads, and you can report and block the site.

And, you know, I don't know if that in the grand scheme of things, one man's report and block campaign is going to make the difference, but it can't hurt. It's worth it. I mean, same way you should report the spam phone calls you get. Punch that number into, like, the FCC website.

I don't know if anybody's monitoring the FCC website anymore, but I don't know if they are. There was a time when that was a useful thing to do. Yeah, I think Google is more likely to be monitoring the, the spam complaints than our federal government right now. All right, man, I saw that's retangle, Tangle News. You do great work. I really appreciate that you posted this or drawing our attention to this,

and we're going to keep following it, all right? Thanks for having me on, Tim. I appreciate it, man. Thanks, man. Everybody else, subscribe to this feed if you had in real news right here. Subscribe. See you.