A group of Texas landowners are railing against President Donald Trump as he seeks to force them to sell parts of their property to build his long promised border wall.
Residents in Starr County, in southern Texas, are being hauled to court to face off with high-powered administration lawyers who have filed eminent domain lawsuits.
Eminent domain cases are used to force landowners to sell private property for public use, even if the owner does not want to sell.
Alejo Clarke, who has lived in the county for 58 years, told The Wall Street Journal he is fighting back against the order.
The Trump administration is seeking one acre of his land in order to erect the 18 foot wall.
Trump was elected on a campaign promise to make America safer by securing the borders and conducting mass deportations. A spokesperson for the administration noted a border wall is ‘the most safe and efficient way possible.’
But Clarke claims doing so would cut him off from expansive plots of land where he has fished and hunted his entire life.
‘I’m not gonna beat Trump – you know it and I know it,’ he said. ‘But if someone is going to kick your butt, are you just going to lie down?’
Trump was elected on a campaign promise to make America safer by securing the borders and conducting mass deportations
A spokesperson for the administration noted a border wall is ‘the most safe and efficient way possible’
Clarke maintained he has not noticed any security problems on his property, and said the billions of dollars the government has allocated to building the wall would be better spent helping farmers in the region bounce back from a water shortage.
He claimed the government has offered just $3,000 in compensation for the land it plans to take.
Clarke tried to fight a similar plan from the Trump administration during the first term in court by himself, but said that with only a seventh-grade education, he was out of his depth.
Biden returned the land to him, but it’s now once again at risk. He has hired a lawyer to help him fight the eminent domain lawsuit, but will struggle to afford the associated costs, he said.
‘This is the piece they want to take out of me,’ he said. ‘My entrance y todo.’
Raquel Oliva has found herself in a similar situation, fighting to keep land which has been in her family since 1798, growing crops of cotton, hay and tomatoes.
The government filed proceedings in February to take over less than three acres of the family’s land to construct a portion of the wall.
But Oliva said the government’s use of three acres would in turn block off access to more than 100 acres where her family has hunted, farmed and operated a gas well.
The 75-year-old used AI to help her draft an objection letter to the government, arguing the wall would be detrimental to her family’s work.
Trump restarted efforts to build the border wall as soon as he returned to office in January (pictured, the wall under construction in Quemado, Texas in January)
Pictured: Migrants gather at Rio Grande at the border wall
She has requested a 16-foot access gate, an irrigation pipeline and more compensation.
‘No one has a problem stopping illegal immigration or drugs, but we live on the border – it’s always been like this,’ Oliva said.
‘Now it feels like an invasion of the government on us.’
Since returning to power, the government has filed dozens of eminent domain lawsuits in Texas as the administration seeks to deliver on Trump’s promise of securing US borders.
These cases are often complex because they involve small patches of land with generations of owners and poorly documented titles.
Some of the cases list upwards of 100 defendants who have ownership claims over tiny pockets of land, while others list ‘unknown heirs’ of late former owners.
But Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said completion of the border wall is crucial to the government’s policy and national security.
‘Successful mass deportations mean nothing if we don’t control the border and keep future illegal aliens out,’ she recently wrote in a New York Post opinion column.
‘That’s why the BBB legislation also funds hundreds of miles of new border wall and water-based barriers in the Rio Grande, which will permanently secure the border for decades.’
Trump is also ramping up a hiring spree for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The administration has carried out 239,000 deportations so far this year, according to data published by The Washington Post last lmonth.
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