Trump administration asks Supreme Court to let Big Bend border wall construction resume

Justice Samuel Alito on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, called for a response to the federal government’s emergency request to restart border wall construction in the Big Bend region of West Texas. The response is due by 4 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29, according to the Supreme Court’s docket for the case, Mullin v. Friends of the Ruidosa Church, No. 26A560.¹

Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the application on Wednesday, Oct. 21, on behalf of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It asks the court to stay a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas and also to treat the filing as a petition for a writ of certiorari, grant it and summarily reverse the lower court. The application says federal law sends review of such an injunction directly to the Supreme Court, with no appeal to a circuit court.²

The lower-court order

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso granted the injunction on Oct. 2 after a hearing. The order bars the government from building border barriers or related infrastructure, or doing any construction or ground-disturbing work, in the Big Bend Sector until it complies with all applicable laws. It stays three waivers of environmental and other laws that the department issued between February and July 2026.³

In an Oct. 14 opinion, Cardone wrote that the plaintiffs were likely to win their claim that the waivers exceeded the secretary’s authority under the major questions doctrine. She found the evidence showed the Big Bend Sector has the lowest rate of illegal entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. In an order signed Oct. 20, she denied the government’s request to pause the injunction.³

The plaintiffs are Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a group working to preserve a historic church in Ruidosa, Texas; the Center for Biological Diversity; and Danny William Miller Junior, a river guide. They sued in April 2026.²³

The two sides

The government’s application calls the order “a baseless injunction” and argues that the district court had no jurisdiction, because the law allows only constitutional challenges to these waivers and the major questions doctrine concerns statutory authority. It says the Big Bend Sector covers nearly one quarter of the border, that the waivers support barrier and road construction spanning more than 300 miles, and that Border Patrol apprehended more than 89,000 people there from 2021 to 2025. It argues its security and operational interests “vastly outweigh any aesthetic, recreational, or cultural injuries” the challengers may suffer. It says workers had built about three-quarters of a mile of barrier before the order.²

The challengers argued in the district court that the Big Bend Sector is “one of the last great wilderness landscapes in the United States” and that a later order could not undo their injuries, the Oct. 14 opinion says. Witnesses testified that barriers would block river access for guides and a rancher and harm soil, vegetation and wildlife.³ The Center for Biological Diversity said in an Oct. 2 statement that the sector accounted for 1.3% of border apprehensions in 2025.⁴ Zeynep Graves, a senior attorney at the center, said after the filing that “only Congress can authorize something as consequential as walling off the entire U.S.-Mexico border,” Marfa Public Radio reported.⁵

What the records do not show

• The docket does not yet list a response from the challengers, and the court has not said when it will rule.¹
• The application and the appendix’s table of contents date the stay denial Oct. 21; the order itself is signed and file-stamped Oct. 20. The records do not explain the difference.²³
• The 89,000 figure comes from the department’s waiver decisions and the 1.3% figure from the challengers; neither record compares them directly.²⁴
• The district court has not ruled on the pending cross-motions for summary judgment.³