Trump’s Desecration of Big Bend Reminds Us Nothing Is Sacred in His America

“Bulldozers have started work around Big Bend National Park in Texas amid a battle over the Trump administration's plans to expand the president's border wall across one of the country's most remote national parks,” Newsweek reported last weekend. 

Donald Trump’s decision to move ahead with border wall construction in Big Bend has outraged Texans of all political stripes. Senator John Cornyn and his Democratic challenger James Talarico have both issued statements calling for the protection of the area. Cornyn drafted a letter arguing that construction “would ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife” of one of Texas’s most beloved natural resources. On social media, Talarico called new barriers superfluous, writing that “God already built a wall through Big Bend—it's called the Chisos Mountains.”

Regardless of how you think the Chisos Mountains came to be, it’s true that the area is wild and difficult to traverse. As opponents of the project have insisted, it’s not an ideal entry point for illegal immigration. 

But the practicalities are of little concern compared to the emotional and symbolic aspects of the fight to save Big Bend. The national park comprises over 800,000 acres of mountains, river canyons, and delicate flora and fauna. Talarico deemed it “sacred.” Another Texan called it their “Eden.” Here’s how the National Park Service website currently describes it:

There is a place in Far West Texas where night skies are dark as coal and rivers carve temple-like canyons in ancient limestone. Here, at the end of the road, hundreds of bird species take refuge in a solitary mountain range surrounded by weather-beaten desert. Tenacious cactus bloom in sublime southwestern sun, and species diversity is the best in the country.

What stands out to me here is how special a place like Big Bend ought to be to any administration trying to put forward a robust, flourishing vision of national identity. So Trump’s decision to slice through it with new roads and border barriers isn’t only an example of this administration’s hypocrisy, but a reminder of the perverted and debased sense of nationalism that animates it. 

After all, it’s natural sites full of awe and wonder that helped stir Romantics to articulate some of the first great literary treatises on nationalism, as well as on nature itself. Consider one of the great forerunners of and influences on the Romantics, Robert Burns. Burns helped to redefine Scottishness, and he did so in part by capturing the majesty of Scotland’s natural beauty in his distinct Scots voice:

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high-cover’d with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green vallies below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

Yes, the nation is an imagined thing, a confection of the mind. And yes, the American nation is particularly fraught with histories of enslavement, conquest, and oppression. But the Romantics also understood the power of nature to bind people together through a sense of not only shared space and geography but of our human astonishment at the awful wonderment of the earth. 

Perhaps the most powerful and relevant Romantic text that springs to mind as I read about Big Bend is William Blake’s famous poem, now most commonly known as “Jerusalem.” In it, Blake rages against the inequities and grime, physical and spiritual, of the nascent Industrial Revolution in Britain. Here’s the text:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

While not an enemy of industry, there was certainly something of Blake to Theodore Roosevelt, the president who is most associated today with natural conservation. As Roosevelt once declared: 

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.

Trump’s naked racism and the crude grift of his border wall are painfully obvious to us. But he’s also a developer with the heart and soul of a rapist. Not just a sexual predator, Trump sees the whole earth as a thing to be seized and used. There’s no reverence to his vision of life, human or otherwise. This isn’t a novel observation. The evidence runs throughout his life and has been discussed endlessly in the last ten years. 

But it bears repeating because he isn’t only ransacking our lands. His violence is not just against our bodies, the people held in ICE detention centers or dead on Minneapolis streets. It’s against our minds, against our very souls. In 2025, I wrote that “Trump and his ilk aren’t only keeping immigrants out, they’re setting up a new social hierarchy that places the most predatory, bloody-fanged among us at the top.” A violation like what’s happening at Big Bend is integral to such a project. 

Despite having never visited, when I think of Big Bend, I think of Richard Linklater’s masterful film “Boyhood.” Linklater, who grew up in Texas, shot the film over twelve years with the same cast in order to capture the feeling and rhythms of growing up. He has called it his “ultimate Texas movie.” And so it’s meaningful that the film closes on its lead character, now grown to a young man, sitting after a hike at the Hoodoos in Big Bend, contemplating his life and his future. What so many artists and naturalists have long understood is the capacity for nature to stop us cold and remake our understandings. It can reorient and reinvigorate us. It can inspire, and it can terrify. As with so much else, the Trump administration’s trampling of Big Bend is a denial of these experiences and, as such, the closing of one more window in the American mind. 

Featured Image is Big Bend National Park, from NPS Climate Change Response.