The Biden administration has not sued. It did win a Supreme Court ruling that it could take down the razor wire that Texas has deployed in Shelby Park and elsewhere, which the administration said has led to drowning deaths among migrants. It has now cut razor wire in some sections of the border, but not in Shelby Park, which it can’t access.
Three Biden administration officials said the Supreme Court’s recent razor wire ruling was a win in federal government’s fight with Texas over Shelby Park, but they concede it does not explicitly give control of the area back to Border Patrol.
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The three Biden administration officials told NBC News they do not want a confrontation between Border Patrol and Texas National Guard, but they still consider legal action a tool they might deploy. Shortly after Texas started blocking the Border Patrol from accessing Shelby Park, a mother and two children drowned while crossing the Rio Grande. The officials say they might have been saved if Border Patrol had been able to operate its equipment to surveil the river and respond to migrants in distress.
For now, however, optics mean the administration is holding fire, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. The official said that between the fight to pass a border bill, defend Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an impeachment fight, and other lawsuits challenging Texas, taking on the Republican-led state would ignite another fire at a time when the administration wants to appear tougher on border security.
We keep saying this, but the fact of the matter is the federal government has lost control of part its territory to the state of Texas. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I also think it’s a really fuzzy line, and we’re definitely headed in the wrong direction towards it.
I don’t think a 21st century civil War would have those, it would be a lot of guerilla warfare and nobody will definitively win or lose for a very long time, we’ll just keep seeing headlines about another attack another explosion etc etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
We’ve already had wars like this in history, and I’m a little shocked this isn’t brought up more often. When the citizens with “differences” all live amongst each other and are not geographically separated, it becomes a real shitshow, real fast.
Nope.
More money = more drones = more power = undefeatable.
/s obviously, but it is maddening to hear people talk about modern civil wars as if they’re fought like the American revolutionary war: huge fronts of soldiers walking toward each other, where more bodies and resources were more indicative of a strong force.
That line of thinking went out the window 100 years ago. The sheer might of the US army does not mean as much when it takes just one disgruntled Texan to shoot critical power transformers, take a government official’s child hostage, blow up rail lines, etc…
The idea that the American army is an unbeatable force because of our money expenditure is nothing more than American exceptionalism, and I’d encourage believers of that line of thinking to learn about modern guerilla warfare.
I fully expect that the rest of the US, assuming they still acted in concert, could occupy Texas indefinitely, but it would be like Iraq and would be a huge cost in all sorts of ways. They bigger thing is I kind of doubt the rest of the red states would want to support that effort, and many of the blue states frankly would be happy to see Texas go and stop screwing up so much stuff while costing federal dollars.
Exactly
Perhaps, but they’d be really short sighted then, because Texas would just become the Afghanistan to our Pakistan, e.g. where terrorist assholes flee to after launching attacks in Pakistan
If we really get to this point, it’s going to be bad choices and worse choices and just a lot of needless suffering and death
They’ll welcome us as liberators!
The really scary problem is that it’s most likely a line we won’t recognize until after it’s been crossed. It’s possible we’ve already crossed the line and are simply waiting for it to get out of control.