According to First Liberty Institute, they along with a division at University of Texas at Austin (UT) filed a petition to reverse a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They want the Supreme Court to override the lower court’s decision allowing the city of San Antonio to destroy and redevelop sacred religious land at the expense of Native Americans.
For thousands of years, tribes in the San Antonio area have worshiped in the San Antonio River at a sacred site now known as Brackenridge Park. This place has long been used for meetings, ceremonies and access to fresh water.
Now, the city of San Antonio is planning a redevelopment project for the park that would remove heritage trees and deter nesting from migratory birds, including those that are central to the tribe's beliefs and practices. The city plans to redo the area for the zoo that they are constructing on the San Antonio River.
According to San Antonio Report, a lawsuit was originally brought forth in 2023 on behalf of two members of the Lipan-Apache Native American Church after the city council voted to move forward with the project.
Steven T. Collis is a clinical professor and the director of UT's Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center and the Law & Religion Clinic. He said that "bulldozing a religious site is the definition of burdening religious practice."
However, Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel at First Liberty Institute, says that this case has far deeper implications than protecting a Native American worship site.
“See, the problem that we have is that in many parts of the country, religious liberty does not enjoy very strong protections, and there's nothing really stopping these governments from coming in and seizing churches, bulldozing cathedrals and that sort of thing whenever they think that there's some sort of better use,” Sasser states.
The protections of future religious practices, he says, from government interference heavily rely on the results of this case.
“There are a lot of states that would just like to drive Christians right out of the door, just drive them off the land, and whatever rules we set in this case are going to be the rules that we get to use for Christians and people of other faiths in some of those hostile places,” Sasser says.
