A Republican former Texas land commissioner led a crowd of more than 2,000 people in a chant of "no damn wall" at the Texas Capitol on Saturday. A right-wing gun YouTuber running for Congress said opposition to the wall at Big Bend is "something we can actually agree on." A Democratic state senator said his office had been flooded with messages from constituents who love the park. Local sheriffs, tourists, conservationists, and Native American communities all said the same thing.

Nobody wants this wall in Big Bend.

Big Bend National Park is the largest single chunk of public land in Texas. It is a place of desert landscapes, dark skies, river rafting, and hikes through the Chisos Mountains. Families get married there for $60 at Sotol Vista Overlook. Bighorn sheep and black bears depend on river access that a steel bollard wall would permanently sever. And on the canyon walls of the Big Bend region sit dozens of rock art murals representing 175 generations of human knowledge, sacred landscapes that anthropologists describe as libraries carved in stone, many of them still sacred to Native American communities today. A border wall would wall them off or destroy them entirely.

The One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $46.5 billion for border wall construction. For comparison, the entire National Park Service budget is $3.3 billion. And to speed construction through the Big Bend sector, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived a slew of environmental and historic preservation laws, the very laws that exist specifically to protect places like this from exactly this kind of federal overreach.

CBP has responded to public outcry by quietly updating its wall maps multiple times without explanation, first suggesting technology only, then updating again, with no definitive commitment to spare the parks. That is not reassurance. That is an agency reserving the right to change its mind without accountability.

Verbal commitments from an agency that has already waived the laws designed to constrain it are worth nothing. The only protection that matters is the kind that Congress writes into legislation and that no agency can quietly reverse with an updated map on a government website.

This is not a partisan issue. It never was. The people of Texas, Republican and Democrat alike, are speaking with one voice. Congress must listen and act before construction equipment arrives at a landscape that took 175 generations to create and cannot be rebuilt.

Sign this petition to demand Congress pass legislation explicitly prohibiting physical wall construction through Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, restore all waived environmental and historic preservation protections in the Big Bend sector, and require CBP to provide a full public accounting of its current and planned border infrastructure in the region.