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HUGO AND MAGALI Urbina used to consider Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, a kindred spirit. At the start of the summer the conservative Christian retirees could be found fishing on the banks of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, where their pecan orchard abuts Texas’s border with Mexico. Migrants would wade through the water onto their land, where federal border agents usually picked the intruders up without much drama.
In July everything changed. Texas seized the strip of land along the river against the Urbinas’ will. State troopers laid down razor-wire and migrants bleeding from cuts began to climb ashore. Unlike the federal agents, state police were directed not to help the new arrivals and, by some accounts, were told to push them back into the river. By Christmas the couple had grown accustomed to finding little girls wandering alone in their orchard and seeing dead bodies beneath the trees. They blame Mr Abbott.
Three years ago, shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Texas governor launched “Operation Lone Star”. As migrant arrivals at the border surged, Mr Abbott reckoned it was up to Texas to use state power to stanch the crisis. He declared a “disaster” in dozens of Texas counties and deployed the Texas National Guard as well as state police officers. They had no power to enforce federal laws, but they arrested thousands of people for criminal trespass.
As a partisan gambit, the plan worked brilliantly. Texas Republicans have ignited a constitutional battle with Washington over whether their state has the right to police its own international border and even displace federal border agents. Mr Abbott meanwhile bused asylum-seekers to cities run by Democrats, contributing to a surge of arrivals that overwhelmed shelters and drained social-service budgets.
Democrats dismissed the busing as a stunt, which it unarguably was. Yet it compelled big-city mayors to confront the realities of skyrocketing migration and to lobby the Biden administration for help. In December Mr Abbott signed SB4, a law which allows Texas to arrest and deport people who have entered the state illegally. Most recently, state police blocked federal officers from entering Shelby Park, a busy stretch of the border near the Urbinas’ property in Eagle Pass.
Mr Abbott sometimes talks like an Old West marshal who must stand up for Texas citizens because Democrats in Washington won’t. “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” the governor said on a talk-show in early January.
Texas’s actions are begging for constitutional review. In 2012 the Supreme Court struck down much of Arizona’s SB1070, a law that made illegal immigration a state crime and allowed cops to ask people to prove citizenship on demand. The recent policing in Texas constitutes a far more aggressive interpretation of state power, says Denise Gilman of the University of Texas at Austin. On January 22nd, in one of several cases challenging Operation Lone Star, the Supreme Court issued an emergency 5-4 ruling against Texas and for the Biden administration, holding that federal border agents had the right to cut razor-wire installed by Texas police.
More such litigation awaits, and the narrow margin in the razor-wire matter suggests the court’s expanded conservative majority may be unsettled about how far to go. In this instance, Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett were the only conservatives to join the court’s liberal minority in backing federal power. “This is not over,” Mr Abbott posted after the decision. Troopers could be seen installing more razor-wire in Shelby Park the next morning. A federal lawsuit challenging buoys erected by Texas in the Rio Grande is before the Fifth Circuit and another on SB4 sits with a district judge in Austin.
Mr Abbott’s political instincts may be sound, but state police have done no better than the feds at deterring migration. Last month, a record 10,000 people crossed into America from Mexico each day and around 40% came through Eagle Pass. There, a string of buoys takes up less than a fifth of a mile in a 1,200-mile-long river border. “It’s like putting a postage stamp in the middle of a football field and saying, hey, stop this running back that’s coming at you,” says Henry Cuellar, a Democratic border congressman. Shelby Park, where federal agents were expelled, is about the size of a small golf course. Though fewer migrants arrived in January, experts attribute the slowdown to seasonal ebbs and flows and to Mexico detaining more migrants across the river in Piedras Negras.
Texas has so far expended more than $4bn on its plan, but under prevailing rules, border counties can apply for grants only for law enforcement, jail operations, court administrations, lawyers for indigent defendants and human-remains processing. That has left many social and humanitarian needs unmet. The hospitals in Eagle Pass and El Paso are staggering under the burden of caring for wounded migrants. Eddie Morales, a Democrat who represents a border district, wants to pause asylum-processing to discourage arrivals until the frenzy calms. Texas officials defend their barriers as necessary deterrents to prevent crossings of a ‘‘dangerous river where many have lost their lives”, Christopher Olivarez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) recently.
These days the banks of the Rio Grande are strewn with enough clothing and shoes to fill a shopping mall. Haribo wrappers and stray baby-socks are a reminder of the children coming through. On warmer days Mexicans wade into the water to collect items that they can sell back home, calling out to American soldiers to throw more garments over the razor-wire. The detritus is evidence of the ongoing toll of failed public policies. And politicians at every level of American government bear some responsibility. ■
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BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.
“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.
“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.
Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.
The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.
On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.
Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
THESE DAYS are dire and dour for Democrats. But April 1st brought a brief reprieve—and not because of jokes. That was the day that the most expensive judicial election in American history in the battleground state of Wisconsin ended in a decisive triumph for the left-leaning candidate. It had drawn $100m of spending, including an estimated $25m from Elon Musk who also, perhaps unhelpfully, personally campaigned in the state. The same day, two special elections in Florida for vacant congressional seats took place in safe Republican districts. Although they did not win, Democrats improved their margins by 17 and 20 percentage points compared with the general elections held just five months ago. Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, staged a one-man protest on the floor of the Senate, excoriating President Donald Trump’s administration for 25 hours straight—a stunt, to be sure, but one that demonstrated proof of life in a party that supporters worried had gone limp.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Markets have turned their sights on how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration arrived at the figures behind the sweeping tariffs on U.S. imports declared Wednesday, which sent global financial markets tumbling and sparked concerns worldwide.
Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”
An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.
Chart of reciprocal tariffs.
Courtesy: Donald Trump via Truth Social
Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S. CNBC could not independently verify the U.S. administration’s data on these duties.
It didn’t take long for market observers to try and reverse engineer the formula — toconfusing results.Many, including journalist and author James Surowiecki, said the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries.
Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach to calculate tariffs and would imply the U.S. would have only looked at the trade deficit in goods and ignored trade in services.
“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.
“Given that U.S. goods are much more expensive, and the purchasing power is lower for countries targeted with the highest levels of tariffs, such option is not optimal. Vietnam, for example, stands out in having the 4th largest trade surplus with the U.S., and has already lowered tariffs versus the U.S. ahead of tariff announcement without any reprieve,” Nguyen said.
The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative laid out its approach on its website, which appeared somewhat similar to what cyber sleuths had already figured out, barring a few differences.
The U.S.T.R. also included estimates for the elasticity of imports to import prices—in other words, how sensitive demand for foreign goods is to prices—and the passthrough of higher tariffs into higher prices of imported goods.
“While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero. If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the website reads.
This screenshot of the U.S.T.R. webpage shows the methodology and formula that was used in greater detail:
A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Some analysts acknowledged that the U.S. government’s methodology could give it more wiggle room to reach an agreement.
“All I can say is that the opaqueness surrounding the tariff numbers may add some flexibility in making deals, but it could come at a cost to US credibility,” according to Rob Subbaraman, head of global macro research at Nomura.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this piece.