Donald Trump wants his wall so badly that he'll destroy American history to get it.
We don’t really need any more reasons to know that Donald Trump’s border wall is a terrible and ghastly idea. But just in case the waste of money, blatant xenophobia, lies, lack of public support, and complete failure to meaningfully address drug addiction aren’t enough, here’s one more: The plan will destroy sacred sites, including cemeteries.
The Los Angeles Times reports that in 2018, the Trump administration was fully preparing to bulldoze its way through cemeteries near the border in order to build a fence. They received the approval to do so from officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who waived laws that were previously designed to protect certain sites from fencing and barrier projects—including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts and a prohibition against disturbing the dead. In other words, Trump wants his base to have a wall so badly that he is willing to destroy wildlife refuges and build on top of dead bodies, robbing people of the right to pay respects to their relatives.
How completely repugnant and shameful.
And it gets worse. In one Texas town, building Trump’s border fence would destroy an important piece of American history. The Jackson Ranch Church Cemetery, which sits north of the Rio Grande, is the resting place of families who bore the surnames Jackson and Ramirez. Nathaniel Jackson, born in 1798, was the heir to a plantation in Alabama. Jackson fell in love with an enslaved woman named Matilda Hicks, with whom he married and started a family. When the Civil War broke out and threatened their interracial family, they fled to Texas, stopping at the Rio Grande where they could also get to Mexico, which had already abolished slavery.
Subsequently, Jackson bought a ranch that became a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was never caught, and after his death, he was buried in a family plot on the ranch. His children were also buried nearby in a second cemetery. For years, generations of the family maintained both the cemeteries. As time went on, the Jacksons intermarried with Tejano families—hence becoming Ramirezes. Their black ancestry faded eventually, but the Ramirezes continue to maintain the cemeteries to this day, which also now include monuments to their descendants who fought in World Wars I and II and Korea. In one, there is even a headstone honoring an ancestor who fought for the South in the Civil War, placed there before the Ramirez family knew their family history of involvement in the Underground Railroad.
The family has obtained a lawyer and joined local activists in fighting the plan for the border fence, which would be built along a levee and cut off access to part of the cemeteries. While the government has given Trump the go-ahead to ruin not just sacred burial sites but also this vital part of history, they can’t even answer basic questions about the plan, such as: Will the bodies be exhumed? Will they be moved if they are exhumed? Who will pay for that? Will they consult the Ramirez family to get their permission?
Just after Trump declared his bogus national emergency to try to get his wall, one of the supervisors on the Border Patrol “wall team” (yes, that’s an actual thing) went on television to discuss construction of the wall. He gave a very vague response to the concerns about the fate of cemeteries in this process, saying that there is no construction planned on the border fence near cemeteries “at this time.”
There are other families in the area that say that past fence construction has cut off their access to cemeteries as well. Those graves were simply bulldozed over, and the relatives were not allowed to visit the area for over a decade. When they finally were permitted access, they couldn’t find the graves of their relatives, and the cemetery was overgrown with brush, having been abandoned that entire time.
Just when you think this situation can’t get any worse, it does. Trump is hell-bent on getting his border wall and is content to destroy lives in the process. He’ll also ruin a slice of the history marked by courage and determination on behalf of freedom for black Americans. Surely that’s not just coincidence. Trump is nothing if not consistent about making life unbearable for black and brown people, and that’s just what his base wants. Their so-called economic anxiety (read: racism) is so strong, they’ll gladly destroy the past, present, and future in order to preserve their own comfort and way of life.
