Indigenous activists vow to block Trump wall construction through historic Texas cemetery
The 154-year-old Eli Jackson Cemetery sits about a mile from the Rio Grande, south of the Hidalgo County town of San Juan. Encompassing just a single acre, it hosts the remains of some 150 South Texans. Just a few feet north rises a sloped earthen river levee, which the Trump administration soon plans to transform into a 30-foot concrete and steel border wall. South of the wall, the feds plan to clear a 150-foot “enforcement zone,” raising fears that bodies will be exhumed, and most of the cemetery razed.
But the dead have new company: a small group of Native American activists and allies who say they’ll stand in front of the bulldozers and refuse to move.