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Last February, 41-year-old Molly Walker posted an Instagram story: a photo of herself standing in the desert, sunglasses hooked over the front of her shirt, jeans slung low beneath her exposed midriff. She held a protest sign fashioned from a pizza box, a hand-drawn heart framing the words “Border Cultura”, with “NO WALL” scrawled beneath.
The text over the photo included a call to action: “… if you want to organize, DM me.”
Born and raised in the Big Bend region of far-west Texas, Walker had no idea that a single social media post would help ignite one of the most surprising bipartisan grassroots campaigns in recent US history.
“The five people who responded to that photo,” Walker says, “with their various skill sets, I thought, ‘Wait … we can actually do something. Let’s try to do something!’”
Walker and a handful of other committed residents have since paused their careers, dedicating themselves full-time to a campaign they call No Big Bend Wall (NBBW). The proposed border wall, they argue, threatens their home, their livelihoods and the wilderness along the Rio Grande corridor.
“I’ve walked away from all of my sources of income,” Walker says. “We’ve tried to put our energy back into our other work, but it doesn’t feel right.” She adds: “At first, I wasn’t even eating or sleeping. I didn’t expect my Instagram post to become the foundational block. I felt responsible.”
The previous summer, Congress had passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, giving the Department of Homeland Security $46.5bn to expand the border wall. The legislation delivered on the first half of Donald Trump’s promise to “build the wall” along the Rio Grande. The second half – that Mexico would pay for it – never materialized.
In the Big Bend region, including the national park where illegal crossings are rare, a concrete and steel wall is difficult to justify. According to experts, what a wall would do, apart from providing an eyesore, is cause irreparable damage to wildlife, limit paddlers’ and fishers’ access to the Rio Grande, and likely strip the Big Bend of its international dark sky status – a mainstay of its tourism industry.
“We live in a desert and they’re building a wall that cuts us off from our river. It makes no sense,” says Clara Bensen, one of the five respondents to Walker’s Instagram story, who says that she and her collaborators have cycled through something akin to the stages of grief. “First it was shock,” she says. “Then anger. Now I think we’ve internalized the reality of a long-term fight.”
Since February, concerned citizens have been glued to the smart wall map on the US Customs and Border Protection website, where, often in response to public pressure, including an April protest at the Texas state capitol, the construction plans keep changing.
Currently, the map suggests a wall through the region, but only surveillance technology and patrol roads in the national park. Because CBP has offered so little by way of transparency, however, many remain skeptical, and even if the map reflects reality, the problem is far from solved.
For one thing, this is Texas, where residents aren’t exactly amenable to “surveillance”. For another, a wall in the region will impact the entire ecosystem, so experts say that the park’s flora and fauna will still suffer.
Media attention surrounding the resistance to the Big Bend wall has focused heavily on the unlikely bipartisanship. “I’ve never worked with so many conservatives,” says Bensen. Border agents, sheriffs, progressive activists, leftwing and rightwing politicians have coalesced – drawing up lawsuits, mobilizing local landowners, traveling to Washington to deliver a petition (the signatures on which have exceeded 150,000) to Texas senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
The full picture, however, is more nuanced and, unfortunately, more fraught, as key members of the community capitulate. In April, a local pecan farmer tried to sell well water to a 500-person man camp of border wall construction workers. In May, a local landowner leased space in his RV park to wall contractors. Perhaps most dishearteningly, despite outdoor goods company Yeti’s use of Big Bend imagery in its marketing materials and the company’s professed commitment to nature conservation, the 5,200-acre Moody Bennett Ranch, partly owned by Yeti co-founder Ryan Seiders, succumbed, according to a report by Marfa Public Radio.
Barnard Construction, to whom the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $960m wall contract in March, has been buying building materials from Moody Bennett, which runs along the Rio Grande on the proposed wall path, as well as using the land for its equipment. Seiders did not respond to requests for comment. “Yeti Holdings does not have any involvement or ownership in Moody Bennett Ranch or Trans Pecos Ice, LLC,” said a Yeti spokesperson.
“The only reason there’s any work getting done is those people,” Yolanda Alvarado, whose family owns two ranches in the Big Bend, says about the landowners who are cooperating with the contractors. “And they stand to make a lot of money.”
As landowner coordinator for NBBW, Alvarado is in constant contact with other local landowners, explaining their rights to them and presenting them with their legal options (Conserve Big Bend, the umbrella non-profit that contains NBBW, has developed a legal defense fund). If more landowners capitulate, she has a lot to lose: the wall would cut one of her family’s ranches in two, and their well and ancestral cemetery would sit on the inaccessible side.
In the meantime, “we’re fighting like hell,” says NBBW board member David Keller, an archaeologist and co-owner of a popular local bar. “That’s for damn sure.”
Alvarado is confident: “A lot of people say, ‘This is the federal government and they’ll do what they want,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s not how this works.’ We have a brilliant team. There’s not going to be a wall.”
“I have family from Presidio that goes way back. As a little girl we’d travel here and I dreamed of living here,” says Anna Claire Beasley, another local at the forefront of NBBW. “It took effort, time and dedication to make the move and I didn’t do all that for nothing. I’m not going to roll over.” She adds: “We know that we only have each other. There’s no one we can call.”
This harsh reality functions as the movement’s engine: most Americans don’t care much about far-west Texas, or if they do, they care in the abstract. It’s the locals – like NBBW and another organization called No Wall 79852 – who have to lead the fight. And bipartisan though the resistance may be, at the highest levels, the Texas GOP has employed careful, noncommittal language in response to questions about the administration’s plans.
As for the rest of the country, many have “no idea what the border actually is,” Walker says. “The American understanding is built off worst-case scenarios and manufactured fear rhetoric; it completely disregards that there are American lives and thriving communities rooted to the border.”
And so the fight remains in the hands of residents like Walker and Keller. In the past few years, Keller lost his job, both of his parents and a serious relationship. Big Bend is all he has left.
“I’ve pinned my entire life on this place,” Keller says. “So what does it mean to lose it? Some might say, ‘Well, you’re not losing it. They’re just building a wall through it.’ But to me, it’s a total loss. I don’t know if I could stay.”
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