Customs and Border Protection faces bipartisan backlash from locals for 30ft border wall through west Texas

The Trump administration is pressing forward with construction on the controversial border wall in the Big Bend region of west Texas, even as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) faces furious backlash from local leaders and landowners for its fast-moving plans.

Construction began this week in Hudspeth county, which lies just east of the city of El Paso. CBP has been pressing landowners there to grant permission to allow the agency to erect a 30ft steel bollard border wall in that area, offering them signing bonuses as an incentive to avoid eminent domain disputes.

The DOI placed QR codes in national parks, inviting visitors to report content deemed ‘negative about either past or living Americans’. Instead, it became a mode of resistance

Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump and his administration have launched a campaign to censor American history at US national parks and federal lands.

As part of Executive Order 14253, “Restoring truth and sanity to American history”, the Department of Interior (DOI) ordered park rangers to review all signs, brochures, books and films for content that “inappropriately disparages” Americans by suggesting that the United States was “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”. It’s resulted in dozens of sign removals across the US, most of them related to slavery, Indigenous history and the climate crisis.