The Texas Border Standoff Is an Acute Crisis with Terrifying Implications

Is this how America ends? Echoes of nullification crises and Civil War, and the dissolution of the Union

Photo credit: CNN

Last Wednesday, on January 24, Texas Governor Greg Abbott released a remarkable statement that opened with an astonishing line: “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States.” Abbott declared that the “lawless border policies” by the “lawless president” Joe Biden had failed to protect the state of Texas from the “invasion” of migrants. The governor therefore invoked the “State right of self-defense.”

Abbott’s statement came in reaction to a Supreme Court ruling declaring that federal agents do indeed have the right to remove razor wire Texas has deployed without federal authorization along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. By “right to self-defense,” Abbott means the right to ignore the decision of the Supreme Court as well as that of a Federal Appeals Court and to continue to militarize the border without permission from the federal government, under whose purview immigration and border protection clearly fall. “Self-defense” means open defiance of the president’s authority and nullification of federal law.

It's been almost a week since this latest escalation in the border standoff between the federal government and the state of Texas. This should be a massive story. And yet it has not received all that much attention in mainstream media. The New York Times, for instance has barely devoted any focused coverage to it. This is the sign of a deeply disturbing political situation that produces too many fires on too many levels at all times, but also of a political media machine that doesn’t have its priorities right.

It is, admittedly, not at all clear where this situation will go. As of right now, it is basically a standoff between Texas, which has the explicit support by 25 other Republican-led states, and the federal government; and, on the ground, between federal border patrol agents on the one hand and the Texas National Guard, state troopers, and Texas Department of Public Safety officials on the other. This might well go back to the Supreme Court soon. It might escalate on the ground or it might not. But whatever comes next, this is a hugely significant crisis because it captures so much of the conflict that shapes our present; and if it is indicative of what is to come in 2024 and beyond – and I see no reason why it wouldn’t be – then it is massively concerning.  

How we got here

This situation – which either already is a full-blown constitutional crisis or is rapidly getting there, depending on where exactly one wants to draw the line – has been brewing for almost three years. In the Washington Post, Philip Bump provided an excellent timeline of the events that got us to where we are today, and I encourage everyone to check out his detailed dissection. As an overview, the story goes something like this: In March 2021, Abbott announced “Operation Lone Star,” a broad-scale offensive against “the smuggling of people and drugs” into Texas, operated by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). By the summer of 2022, the Department of Justice was investigating “Operation Lone Star” for alleged civil rights violations. But Governor Abbott remained undeterred: He declared a state emergency and had razor wire installed along 60 miles of the border without prior federal authorization. As he made clear in March 2023, he “wasn’t asking for permission” – even though, and this bears repeating, constitutionally, he really needs to do exactly that: ask for federal permission.

In July 2023, Texas began deploying a floating barrier of buoys designed to maim or kill whoever tried to get through the Rio Grande River along a 1000-feet stretch of the border in Eagle Pass, Texas, an area that had seen a particularly high number of border crossings. Within weeks, the Justice Department sued Texas over this – both on humanitarian grounds as well as because Texas lacked authority for such actions. Soon, the first cases of migrants, including children, getting hurt by the razor wire Texas had installed were documented; in August, the bodies of migrants were found near Eagle Pass: They had drowned, one of the bodies was stuck on the floating barrier.

This case made its way through the courts until finally, in December, a Federal Appeals Court ordered Texas to remove the floating barrier. Instead of complying, Abbott announced massive new funds for more border barriers shortly before Christmas and signed a law making it a state crime to illegally cross into Texas, declaring that Texas had a right to apprehend people who do, put them in jail, deport them, make all of these decisions on immigration on its own. Just to be clear how radical this step is: This law is upending the entire system of how immigration is supposed to work in America, and Texas has announced that the government of the United States does no longer have authority over part of an international border – a border to another country.

The next level of escalation was reached on January 11, when Texas state troopers and DPS officials closed down and took control of Shelby Park, a 50-acre public park in Eagle Pass along the Rio Grande River, under the umbrella of a disaster declaration. They have been denying federal agents access to this part of the border ever since.

On January 22, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and declared that federal agents were allowed to remove the razor wire at the border that had been deployed without federal authorization. Even though the legal and constitutional arguments advanced by Texas are complete bunk (more on that in a minute), justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh dissented. A remarkable institution, the Supreme Court. And Abbott remained unimpressed, releasing the above cited statement according to which the federal government has no authority to do anything.

Neo-confederate legal theories

Mark Joseph Stern had a great breakdown of why the legal and constitutional case Texas is advancing does not hold up to scrutiny. It rests on two pillars. The first one is the idea that Texas is being invaded, and that declaring an “invasion” gives Abbott, as he put it in his statement, the right “to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.” One glaringly obvious problem is that there simply is no invasion. People seeking asylum is very clearly not what the founders had in mind when they used the term “invasion.” The constitution envisions a state under attack from an enemy force, needing to defend itself until the federal government – far, far away in Washington, with no standing army at its disposal – was ready to act. That is obviously not the situation today. The idea that states can just unilaterally designate whatever they want an “invasion” if it suits their interests and thereby circumvent federal authority is preposterous.

The second pillar of the argument Texas is making is the so-called “compact theory” – an idea that has not been entertained by serious people in a long, long time. According to the compact theory, the constitution is just a contract that entails certain duties the federal government, and especially the president, has to fulfill. If those duties are neglected, the states, understood as sovereign entities, are free to disregard federal authority, ignore federal law, and, ultimately, leave the Union. This is precisely the argument slave states used to justify secession. As Mark Joseph Stern succinctly put it with regards to Abbott’s statement: “This language embraces the Confederacy’s conception of the Constitution as a mere compact that states may exit when they feel it has been broken.”

Honestly, it makes sense for Abbott and today’s reactionary Right to adopt these neo-confederate arguments. In a way, they are just explicitly emphasizing the tradition in which their political project stands, as they are once again defying the federal government and deploying “states’ rights” in order to justify inhumane brutality in service of upholding white nationalist domination. The fact that this argument was resoundingly defeated – politically and on the battlefield – does not matter to them: The Republican Party and the extremist Right are all in. Among the first to announce support for Greg Abbott was Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. 25 Republican governors have endorsed the position of Texas, pledging their support for Abbott’s fight against the federal government and for the legal theories justifying it; some are even vowing to send their national guards, itching to escalate the situation further. That is something Donald Trump would very much like – he has already called on Republican states to “deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals, and to remove them back across the Border.” And nothing mobilizes rightwing extremists like a standoff with the federals in service of white domination: Elon Musk is on Abbott’s side, propagating Great Replacement conspiracies, the barely concealed subtext of this whole thing, by accusing Biden of wanting to bring in immigrants as illegal voters. And far-right activists have called for a “Take back our border” rally. What could possibly go wrong.

This isn’t just noise – it’s a real crisis

The white reactionary assault on multiracial, pluralistic democracy and constitutional government is happening on so many fronts simultaneously, and MAGA America and its leader are producing so much noise at all times, that it’s easy to lose sight of how things are connected, of what matters and what doesn’t. This border conflict matters greatly, and is greatly concerning, for at least three main reasons.

The first reason: The lives of real human beings are at stake – real people are getting hurt at the Texas border. On January 13, for instance, three migrants drowned near Shelby Park, the contested area in Eagle Pass that Texas authorities have seized. Two of them were children, 8 and 10 years old. As I understand, initial reports that they drowned because Texas kept federal Border Patrol from helping them turned out to be incorrect – although it remains true that Border Patrol no longer has access to that area of the river and was definitely not in any position to do anything to help. People seeking asylum are drowning, families with little children are trying to get through razor wire… Look, it’s obviously not just because of Abbott’s recent measures that the U.S. immigration regime is inhumane. But this type of militarization and brutalization of the border is the manifestation of a level of cruelty and disregard for the lives of fellow human beings that is simply disgusting, disturbing, and morally outrageous. No one who is ok with this gets to call themselves “decent” in any way.

The second reason: “The border” plays an enormously important role in the collective rightwing imaginary, and propagating the idea of a foreign “invasion” in the form of migrants is a central part of how the Right mobilizes its supporters. We will get more of this, and ever more extreme versions – especially in a presidential election year. In 2016, the promise to “build the wall” captured the key role immigration played in Trump’s campaign and for his appeal to the base. In 2018, in the run-up to the midterms, the Right obsessed over the idea of a “caravan” (remember that?) of dangerous brown people – central American migrants – approaching the southern border. The doomsday scenario to them, bizarrely, was Germany. The rightwing machine focused on chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in the summer of 2015 to allow hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to enter the country, by which she had supposedly allowed the country to be swept away by a wave of dangerous Muslims. Trump even deployed thousands of troops to the Southern border shortly before the 2018 election.

Scaremongering about an “invasion” of dangerous non-white people at the border is not something Trump has introduced – it has been a fixture on the Far Right for decades. And every time some immigration deal to solve whatever problem there might be seems within reach, it has been the radical Right sabotaging it. That was the case when the extremist wing of the Congressional GOP killed an immigration reform package that had bipartisan support in 2013, and it is the case now, as Trump and his allies are doing everything they can to sink whatever compromise measure might be available. The Right is not interested in a public policy solution. They are interested in whipping up fear and anger. They don’t want a functioning immigration system. They want to stop all immigration of people who are not white, and they want to get rid of the non-white migrants who are already here.

So, yes, much of this standoff between the state of Texas – and Republican governors around the country – and the federal government is about opportunism. Abbott believes he will benefit from this crisis politically. But underneath the cynicism and opportunism is also a dimension of ideological conviction, a sincerely held worldview in which “real” America, to the Right, is only conceivable as a nation dominated by white Christians. And that nation is under threat from without – “invasion,” “illegals,” the “caravan” – and within, from the Left, the Socialists, the Communists, those Liberals who want to destroy everything America is supposed to be, make it into something it must never become: A godforsaken place of multiracial pluralism. Those who are in charge on the Right truly believe that the federal government is dominated by these “Un-American” enemies – that it has conspired against “real America” since at least the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. Ideology and opportunism reinforcing each other in specific, dangerous ways.

Red America vs Blue America: A country falling apart

The third reason: This is not some isolated incident. It is part of a much bigger story and has to be seen in the broader context of the country falling apart. In general, I don’t like the “new Civil War” terminology all that much. Too often, it suggests a simple repeat of the past. That’s not how history works, ever. Such notions underestimate how specific the constellation of the mid-nineteenth century was – the conflict over slavery defining the country’s institutions, economy, political economy, and culture – that led to deep division escalating to secession and Civil War. Today’s situation doesn’t easily lend itself to the formation of two contiguous power blocks. The country’s political geography, for instance, is defined much more by an urban-rural divide than a conflict between north and south.

But as much as I am professionally obligated to caution against facile historical analogies, Republican states are, right now, openly and aggressively endorsing the argument that led this country into a Civil War. There are, at the very least, some very concerning echoes; and more importantly, there are powerful traditions and continuities. Republican governors are proudly taking up the “states’ rights” mantle to defy the federal government. On the level of the underlying political project and vision of what America should be, there is a fairly direct line from the secession of slave states to today’s neo-confederate use of the “compact” theory as a way to justify the cruel crackdown on an “invasion” of people of color.

And as much as the Civil War analogy may tend to invoke misleading associations, it can actually be helpful if it alerts people to the seriousness of the situation and to the prospect of violence. Because the fact that we will not get a rematch between vast armies dressed in blue and gray meeting on the battlefield does not mean the current situation isn’t extremely volatile and dangerous, or that there won’t be violence. There is likely going to be a lot more political violence.

The gap between Red America and Blue America is rapidly widening. The country has been falling apart into a multiracial, pluralistic “blue” part that accepts the changing social, cultural, and demographic realities vs. a “red” part that is led by patriarchal white nationalists entirely devoted to rolling back those changes.

In many ways, this actually constitutes a return to a constellation that defined American politics before the 1960s: An authoritarian movement entrenching white supremacy in a number of states while also shaping and/or obstructing national policy. Unlike in previous eras of U.S. history, however, the idea of America as a nation of and for white Christians, the ideology of white Christian superiority, now clearly lacks majority support. Those who adhere to what they perceive as the natural and/or divinely ordained order defined by discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, wealth, and religion understand this clearly. That is precisely why they have entirely given up on democratic politics and instead seek to impose their vision on the country via minority rule. The fact that a shrinking minority of white conservatives is consistently being enabled to hold on to power against the will of the majority of voters is causing a legitimacy crisis that is bound to get a lot worse. This situation will have to be resolved, one way or the other. Some form of stability can only be achieved by either overcoming reactionary minority rule – or through ever more oppressive measures.

In Texas, Greg Abbott is currently demonstrating how Republicans intend to resolve this situation: By authoritarian rule, nullification of federal authority, and open rebellion against the government of the United States they perceive to be dominated by “Un-American” forces and therefore fundamentally illegitimate. This must lead to instability and dysfunction, constitutional crises, and, ultimately, violence.

Will this particular standoff at the Texas border escalate into the type of crisis that takes an already volatile political situation to a whole different level? Maybe not. But it’s frighteningly easy to see how it might be a milestone in a series of events that leads to a really dark place.