The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to continue with its plans to construct hundreds of miles of border barrier and security infrastructure in west Texas, while a court hearing over the effort moves forward.

The federal government’s plans have stirred bipartisan backlash for its inclusion of Big Bend National Park, a beloved stretch of public land known for its sweeping canyons and unspoiled desert landscape.

In a five-page decision issued Monday, the high court wrote that the federal judge who ruled on the order didn’t have the authority to weigh in.

“The injunction thus impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity,” reads the unsigned decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter in the decision.

The court wrote that federal law allows the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to waive environmental protections and conservation laws, which they called a “clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms respondents assert.”

In an emergency application to the high court in late October, the federal government urged the justices to intervene and allow the work to begin again, saying that a gap in “border defenses” in the Big Bend region “would act as “a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors.”

Along the border in Texas’ Big Bend region, local residents have displayed signs protesting the Trump administration’s border security plans for the area.

Carlos Morales/for NPR.

hide caption

toggle caption
i

Carlos Morales/for NPR.

A federal judge in El Paso issued the temporary injunction that halted the construction of 30-foot-tall steel barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, brought forward the lawsuit, along with an area nonprofit working to preserve a historic church near the U.S.-Mexico border and a landowner who stands to lose his border property.

“This decision greenlights the contractors and allows the bulldozers to come roaring back into the region,” said Laiken Jordahl with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It allows the dynamiting of national park canyon walls, the bulldozing of pristine desert.”