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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