America is seeing a tiny civil war in Texas

Pundits these days often warn that America may be on the brink of civil war. Finally, they’re right – except that in tiny Eagle Pass, Texas, forget being on the brink. In microcosm, civil war is already under way.

Once again playing immigration hardball, last week the Texas governor Greg Abbott, the vile, heartless Republican whose voodoo doll progressive Democrats poke pins in, sent the Texas National Guard to assume control of an Eagle Pass park used to process migrants and additional lands along the Mexican border. In so doing, the state militia is actively blocking the US Border Patrol from policing several miles along the banks of the Rio Grande. The intention, according to the Texas Military Department, is to block ‘organisations that perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings’. Those organisations would seem to include the federal government.

Now, Fort Sumter this is not. It’s hard to see conflicting jurisdiction over a park escalating into a four-year clash between rebel states and DC that ends with 620,000 American dead. Nevertheless, Abbott’s defiance of federal authority further ramps up the antagonism between a governor infuriated by federal inaction on what has become a siege of foreigners in his state and the Biden administration, whose relative passivity in the face of proliferating guests of the nation makes the President, in addiction terms, an ‘enabler’.

What led to the deaths near that occupied park last weekend is disputed, but Homeland Security is clearly attempting to weaponise the drownings of three migrants, two of them children, as a demonstration that Abbott’s cavalier policies endanger human life. Texas has passed a bill making illegal immigration into its territory a state crime, a law on which the feds are asking the courts to slap an injunction before it takes effect in March.