The Trump administration had plans for Big Bend, and the people who live there had objections. On Friday, those objections helped produce a federal court order halting border-barrier and road construction while a lawsuit proceeds. For the moment, the machinery has been told to wait, which is a useful reminder that an administration’s determination to do something doesn’t make its success inevitable.
We headed to Portland on Wednesday morning and went straight to OHSU Doernbecher. The staff got us in and out quickly and took excellent care of our sweet boy. Watching Ezra be sedated was heartbreaking, but he made it through, had the nurses smiling, and came away with a wooden tool set and a spider stuffy. We still haven’t heard the results, so we’re in that peculiar stretch of parenting where the appointment is behind you but the answer remains somewhere ahead.
Afterward, we went to the hotel and ordered dinner in. Ezra was delighted to run around the room after so much time confined to his car seat. My daughter, meanwhile, did beautifully with Grammy, following my preparations for nearly every conceivable school, ballet, and pajama emergency. Apparently, she was capable of having a lovely time while I maintained what amounted to a small Department of Contingencies.
On Thursday we went to Powell’s City of Books, a place I remember from childhood and one my husband had never seen. I may have embarrassed him with the sheer amount of excitement escaping my body, but he soldiered on through what I consider a perfectly reasonable response to Powell’s. Outside, a fundraiser for the Nature Conservancy stopped us. He had been doing the work for nine years, and he told us we were the first people to stop in the hours he’d been there. I know people have schedules, worries, and places they need to be, but it made me sad to think of someone standing there all morning with a cause he clearly cared about while everybody walked past. We listened and donated, and he kept showing up.
My husband and I are tired now that we’re home, but we’re right back to it. He’s outside trying to finish painting the house, and I’m here trying to finish a report about people who kept showing up for something they wanted to protect. I’m glad today’s news gives us an example of what that persistence can accomplish.
In Texas, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone granted an injunction blocking further construction in the Big Bend region. The Associated Press reports that she found the challengers likely to succeed on at least one claim and likely to suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction. The lawsuit continues, and the ruling doesn’t permanently settle the project’s fate. It does change what the government can do while that argument is being heard.
That distinction is especially important to anyone standing between an irreplaceable place and a bulldozer. A landscape doesn’t become less damaged because the people defending it eventually receive a favorable ruling after the machinery has finished. Preventing the destruction while a court considers its legality is a real result, with consequences that exist outside the courthouse.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church, and a local river guide and landowner brought the challenge to the government’s use of sweeping waivers to fast-track construction. According to the Center, those waivers set aside dozens of laws, including protections for national parks, endangered species, and wild and scenic rivers. There is something exquisitely Trump about encountering a collection of laws designed to protect a national park and deciding that the obstacle requiring removal is the collection of laws.
The Texas Tribune reports that the government argues border infrastructure is necessary even in remote, lightly trafficked areas to establish control and prepare for possible shifts in border activity. Residents, businesses, and conservation groups have challenged the harm that construction would cause to the landscape, livelihoods, and access to the Rio Grande. The Center also reports that a voluntary construction pause announced in August expired September 30. Friday’s injunction therefore matters now, when work could have resumed. People brought their objections into a forum where the government had to answer them, and they obtained a restriction on what could happen next. Resistance became an interruption in the machinery.
Mom’s “Carpe Momentum: Revoke Consent” speaks to the work that makes an interruption like that possible. Her piece returns to people finding one another, sharing information, and discovering that the objection they had been carrying alone was shared by others. It emphasizes the infrastructure of resistance: places to gather, ways to communicate, and relationships through which an individual refusal can become collective action.
That’s the part I want to sit with. The people with power would prefer to deal with each of us separately, tired and convinced that everyone else has accepted the arrangement. A network changes the conditions. Someone knows the law, someone documents the damage, someone can organize a meeting, and someone else discovers that the cause they thought was hopeless already has people working on it. Big Bend’s defenders reached the court through months of work. The order is a result of that work, and a reason to keep doing it.
Here in Oregon, we’re part of another fight over what the federal government is allowed to abandon. On Thursday, Oregon joined a coalition led by New York Attorney General Letitia James in asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the EPA’s partial repeal of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards. The rule removes major greenhouse-gas requirements for categories of coal- and gas-fired power plants. It was finalized in September and is scheduled to take effect November 16.
The EPA argues that the affected carbon-capture requirements are insufficiently demonstrated and that repeal will reduce costs. The coalition argues that the agency unlawfully abandoned protections without adequately considering alternatives and the health and climate consequences. The EPA’s own final rule says its economic model doesn’t account for the effects of changing environmental quality. That deserves attention whenever the administration presents the rollback as savings. A calculation can get considerably more cheerful when the consequences most likely to arrive in someone else’s household are left outside it.
Separately, the EPA has proposed additional grounds for eliminating the remaining power-plant greenhouse-gas requirements. That broader action remains a proposal. The coalition also gave notice of its intent to sue over the agency’s failure to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from many existing gas-fired plants. These are different legal steps, and none of them is a court victory yet. Oregon’s participation is just another piece in the larger fight, but it means our state is helping contest a decision that the administration would otherwise carry forward.
Mom and I talked about public health and environmental rights during our live today. These stories show why that conversation belong together. The world outside our homes reaches us through the air, the water, the weather, and the places our children will inherit. Protecting that world requires people who can question a decision together and institutions capable of making those questions consequential.
After Powell’s, we went to Al’s Garden Center and wandered among the plants. We wanted Ezra to be able to walk around outdoors, so we stopped to buy him sneakers and found the last pair in his size. He’s only recently started walking and has very little practice wearing shoes. He has, however, spent plenty of time finding them around our house and wearing them on his hands, which I should perhaps have recognized as research.
The moment his toes crossed the threshold of those new sneakers, my one-year-old tasted freedom. He kept tripping as we walked around the nursery because the shoes were unfamiliar, so my husband tried to take them off. Ezra’s response, in the unmistakable language of a one-year-old, was YOU ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT. He even wanted them put back on for the car ride home this morning. He’d been through an MRI and a long trip, and there he was, determined to meet the world on his own two newly shod feet.
We loved seeing the plants, and I keep thinking about the beautiful trees in Portland and along the drive. They were part of what made the trip beautiful, even while its purpose was an appointment we had waited so long to reach. I want my children to grow up with places like that still around them, and I want the protections for those places to mean something when a powerful person finds them inconvenient.
That asks more of us than admiration, but it also gives us more to work with than despair. People can support the local groups already doing this work, help independent reporting reach someone new, bring evidence to public meetings, and insist that their elected officials defend the protections they were entrusted to uphold. We can take turns carrying the work so exhaustion doesn’t become the administration’s most reliable ally.
We’re home now. I made it back in time to pick my daughter up from school and receive the biggest hug. Ezra has his wooden tools, his spider, and, if he has any say in it, his shoes. We still haven’t heard his results, and my husband is already outside working on painting our green house a slightly different green.
I have plants to tend and more new plants to find homes for, though I’m currently avoiding eye contact with the ones I haven’t planted yet. There are answers we don’t have and jobs we haven’t finished, but there are also people defending a river in Texas and people carrying Oregon’s name into a federal court.
The people in power are making choices about the future. We get to make choices about it, too, and sometimes enough of us making them together changes the instructions given to the machinery. Somewhere in Big Bend, that matters to a piece of ground that gets to remain undisturbed while the fight continues. It matters to the families who belong there, and to all of us trying to leave our children a world still worth coming home to.
If someone you know has begun to wonder whether resistance accomplishes anything, please restack or share this report. Today’s injunction is a concrete answer, and the people doing the next part of the work deserve to be seen.
Paid subscriptions support The Homefront Report and Mom’s clearly superior pieces, though I’ve filed an appeal with a family court that Mom appears to have staffed herself. Thank you for helping us keep researching, writing, and showing up.
If you’d like to leave a little extra love for our family’s projects, plants, and everyday adventures, you can chip in here.
This week brought an MRI trip, a spider stuffy, a pair of sneakers that Ezra considers nonnegotiable, and more plants looking for a home near the house my husband is still painting. We’re waiting for answers and tending to the life we’re building in the meantime.
So pleased Ezra handled the MRI so well and is fiercely protective of his shoes! Best news I've heard all day...
Sending good thoughts to you all. I expect good results from Ezra's MRI.