**To:**

- Tim Barnard, Chairman, Barnard Construction Co., Inc.

- Tommy Fisher, President & CEO, Fisher Sand & Gravel Co. / Fisher Industries

- Rick Lanoha, President & CEO, Kiewit Corporation

- [Leadership], Southwest Valley Constructors (a Kiewit company)

 

RE: destructive construction in the Big Bend region of Texas for border security (for more context see https://nobigbendwall.org/

## The Petition

We, the undersigned, are writing to you as the builders — the individuals and companies whose names, logos, and equipment are now physically present in the Big Bend region of West Texas. Your firms have been awarded billions of dollars in Department of Homeland Security contracts to construct border wall, patrol roads, and surveillance infrastructure across some of the most ecologically rare and culturally significant land in North America, including stretches inside and adjacent to Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park.

We are not asking you to take a side on immigration policy. We are asking you, as builders, to take pride in the standard of your work.

DHS has invoked its waiver authority to bypass the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other statutes that would normally require your projects to undergo environmental review, cultural and archaeological survey, and consultation before a single acre is cleared. That waiver removes the government's obligation. It does not remove yours. A contractor's name goes on the equipment, the signage, and the finished structure — not the waiver's. What gets built in Big Bend will be remembered as your work, done to whatever standard you chose to hold yourselves to when no one made you.

**We are asking each of your companies to commit, publicly, to the following:**

1. **Conduct the assessments DHS waived, on your own initiative.** Complete standard environmental impact review, biological and endangered species surveys, and archaeological and cultural resource assessments for every segment of the Big Bend project your company is building — to the same standard your firms would apply on any other job where the law required it.

2. **Disclose the findings.** Make the results public, including any impacts to the Rio Grande watershed, wildlife corridors, karst and cave systems, dark-sky resources, or sites of Indigenous, Mexican, and borderlands cultural significance.

3. **Commit to full remediation and mitigation**, at the highest applicable standard, for any damage already caused by clearing, grading, or construction to date — and for any future work — regardless of whether DHS requires it.

4. **If your company cannot make these commitments**, withdraw from the contract. There is no shortage of infrastructure work in Texas and across the country that does not carry this cost. Walking away from a job that compromises your standards is not a loss of pride — it is pride.

5. **If DHS refuses to permit this kind of independent assessment and disclosure**, withdraw your participation entirely rather than build blind.

Barnard Construction, Fisher Sand & Gravel, and Kiewit/Southwest Valley Constructors have each built genuine engineering achievements elsewhere — dams, bridges, water systems, restoration projects. That is the standard we are asking you to hold here. Big Bend is not a blank stretch of desert. It is one of the most biodiverse regions in the United States, sacred and significant to the communities who have lived along this river for generations, and effectively irreplaceable once disturbed.

You do not need this contract badly enough to build it carelessly.

**We ask you to sign your name to your standards, not just your structure.**