America’s Most Expensive Road Does Not Protect Any Real Border

There are government projects that are justified by the numbers and projects that are justified despite them. The new border road that the Department of Homeland Security is building inside Big Bend National Park in Texas clearly belongs to the second category, and the numbers are worth examining because, without exaggeration, they represent one of the clearest examples of public waste produced by current U.S. immigration policy.

The plan, revealed in detail by journalist Wes Siler based on a source with direct access to the contract, involves 232 miles of new road—not a wall, as many assumed during months of rumors and contradictory plans—along the 118 miles of border that the park shares with Mexico. The contract costs $1.7 billion, equivalent to $7.3 million for every mile built. Construction began on August 6, but Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott paused the project just eleven days later, on August 17, to personally assess the terrain and hear from the local community, following a letter from Republican Senator John Cornyn requesting that the project be reviewed before moving forward. The fact that an official from the very government promoting the project felt the need to halt it already says quite a bit about how defensible it is on paper.

Let’s start with the most uncomfortable fact: almost nobody crosses there. Throughout 2025, Border Patrol apprehended 200 people along the section of border that passes through the park, representing just 0.05 percent of all apprehensions recorded along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. And the trend is downward, not upward: in the broader Big Bend sector, which covers 517 miles, illegal crossings fell 74 percent between fiscal years 2023 and 2025, according to CBP’s own figures. There is little need to speculate about why. On the Mexican side, the Chihuahuan Desert has not a single road reaching the Rio Grande, and the river itself cuts canyons as deep as 300 meters in some sections. It is a geological barrier more deterrent than any nine-meter structure that could be erected there, and Rodney Scott himself has gone so far as to call the idea of building a traditional wall there “stupid.” When the head of the agency responsible for securing the border describes his own government’s project that way, this is no longer a matter of political disagreement but of basic common sense.

What is actually being built has, it must be said, a less aggressive profile than many feared. According to Siler’s source, there will be no physical wall or artificial lighting for now—a significant decision in a region with the darkest measured night sky in the continental United States and one that forms part of a Dark Sky Reserve—although infrared sensors and vehicle barriers will be installed at points where crossing the river by car is remotely plausible. Maintenance sections will be 3.6 meters wide, while patrol sections will be 7.3 meters wide, all paved. Even so, this network of roads will more than double the total number of paved miles currently existing within a 3,242-square-kilometer park, larger than the state of Rhode Island, and will leave a permanent scar across ecosystems that have remained virtually untouched until now, with corresponding risks to species such as black bears, mountain lions, deer, and wild pigs that depend on free access to the river for water. --------------------------[read more...]

The Republican Loyalty Cracks — And In the Fissure: Cuba, Greenland, and the World

Four Republicans. That's all it took. On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution to force Trump to either withdraw troops from Iran or obtain congressional authorization to continue. The vote was 215 to 208. The margin was microscopic. The signal was deafening. In the party of absolute loyalty, something is breaking.

"People are tired of this. They're tired of $5 gallon gas and $6 gallon diesel, and fertilizer we can't afford to put on our fields in Kentucky." That was a Republican congressman from Kentucky, speaking after the vote. These four defectors are not just the usual rebels. They represent something different: the beginning of a political calculation.

Republicans are staring at approval numbers in the low 30s and doing the arithmetic of the November that is coming. The 2026 midterm elections are no longer a distant horizon. They are the window that has started to close.

The war with Iran, which Trump initially called a "short-term excursion," reaches its 100th day this Saturday. It began on February 28 alongside Israel, without asking Congress for authorization. Trump tried to call it a "skirmish." Congress, which under the Constitution is the only body that can declare war, was not persuaded. This is already the fourth time this year the House has voted on a war powers resolution. The fourth.

But the Iran war is only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is the complete pattern. In January, after the military operation that toppled Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that the United States could intervene in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Iran, and Greenland. "Nobody can stop us," he said. His Secretary of State warned that Cuba "is in a lot of trouble." And Trump promised to "make a deal" — which, translated from Trumpian, almost always means: regime change.

Then came this: "Our great military is loading up and resting, looking forward, actually, to its next conquest." He used the word "conquest" himself. Not a critic. Not an analyst. The president of the United States described his army's actions that way. And meanwhile, on prediction markets, the probability that Republicans lose their House majority has climbed from 8% to 42% in just five months. Like a rocket.

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What we are witnessing is not just an approval crisis. It is the moment when Trump's allies begin to calculate how much they can lose by covering his back. Former allies on the right have suggested the president may be "crazy." Ex-officials from his first administration are floating the 25th Amendment. Sixty-one percent of Americans say Trump has "become erratic with age." Including three in ten Republicans themselves.

Cuba. Greenland. Iran. Venezuela. These are not dots on a map: they are the vertices of a doctrine that nobody explicitly voted for, that no Congress has formally authorized, and that is costing farmers five dollars per gallon of gasoline. Four Republicans said so out loud on Wednesday. The question is not whether there will be more. The question is how many are needed for the calculation to truly change.

The Senate blocked the resolution this same Wednesday. Trump, for now, still has his war. But the next vote is already scheduled. And the crack, once opened, has a physics of its own.

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---Heydi Bernal----