Trump administration begins wall building in the Big Bend region

O beginning construction is an important milestone in the administration's $46 billion plan to align the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology, while seeking to fulfill a key campaign promise of the President, Donald Trump, to complete the wall. And it occurs while Customs and Border Protection reports that it doubled the pace of building the wall along the U.S. border Mexico.

Customs and Border Protection told the Associated Press News Agency that “the installation of wall panels is underway” in a 47-mile section of Hudspeth County, West Texas, known as Big Bend 1.

But there are all five project areas that make up the region of approximately 500 miles from Big Bend, extending from an area of Hudspeth County, south of El Paso, to Amistad Lake.

The agency said the first panels were erected on September 15.

On a map on the agency’s website, where it publishes updates of the construction of the wall across the southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30 - foot - high steel panels while construction workers watched.

The new activity was separated from a border infrastructure project in the next Big Bend National Park, where the administration temporarily suspended construction in an attempt to dialogue with opponents.

In the wider region of the Big Bend, Texas, CBP has faced strong opposition from landowners, environmental groups, entrepreneurs and creators, who claim that the remote region is not an area of great traffic for illegal immigration.

Activists today said they would continue to oppose border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even with the panels being installed.

Clara Benson, one of the founders of No Big Bend Wall, the coalition that has been fighting against CBP's plans, said today in an interview that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks transporting supplies to the remote area along Rio Grande and that there were contractors cleaning backyards to organize supplies.

But speaking of Washington, D.C., where she and other members of the coalition met with legislators, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the plans for building the wall in the region. “We will continue to fight for these lands, no matter what the result. We will continue to fight to the end,” Benson assured.

“ If you talk to people in West Texas, they say even if they do, we'll fight to bring him down. So this fight is not over,” he stressed.

The news comes as the administration speeds up a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-high steel pillar walls, barriers designed to prevent vehicles crossing the border, new patrol roads and various deterrence technologies of migrants or smugglers.

Customs and Border Protection said they are building an average of 12 miles of barriers a week along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and have recently reached a 200-mile mark of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office.

The average 12 miles a week is twice the pace that the agency's manager, Rodney Scott, had mentioned earlier this year.

The agency has faced opposition from environmental groups, a small town that fears that the wall will cause flooding in its area, from Native Americans, who say that the construction is disrupting sacred sites, and from landowners, who claim that the construction will invade their land.