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Notes -
There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
How can Texas physically prevent the border patrol from entering Texas? Texas doesn't have border control between it and other states, and wouldn't part of the border patrol already be in Texas anyway?
Importantly here the BP agents are already in Texas, and are largely Texans who wish that Biden would let them do a better job of stopping the illegal crossings; ie. they mostly support Abbot's side of things.
So it seems unlikely that there will be any sort of direct confrontation between the BP and Texas authorities -- if Biden decides to send somebody more loyal in to cut the razor wire things do get more interesting.
Not only that, Biden has derided them over manufactured outrage. There was a still shot of a mounted CBP agent in the river with people crossing the border, with the agent spinning his reins to control his horse. The media promulgated this as "border patrol agent whips migrants." Biden personally said that the agents involved "will pay" for their actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/us/politics/biden-border-patrol-haitian-migrants.html
So they're really not enthused about not doing the job they signed up for, to help a President that wants them to pay for things they never did.
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