Why are Texas and Florida building their own large, sadistic armies?

It’s the modern conservative version of Chekov’s gun: The verbal cruelty that was the point of Act One of the far right’s drift into authoritarianism — the verbal taunts against Latino or Muslim migrants that dominated Donald Trump’s 2016 rallies, the constant buzz of racism on social media — is twisting into real physical violence here in Act Three.

This crucible of blood and bone is playing out against the cold slashing metal of barbed wire strung out along the Rio Grande River that divides the United States from Mexico in west Texas. The actors are a new breed of troops, accountable not to Washington but to an ambitious Republican governor in Austin, enforcing his Fox News bromides with brutal force.

One harsh encounter near Eagle Pass — the epicenter of this border war — was described to the New York Times last week by a 32-year-old Venezuelan refugee, Marjorie Escobar, who told the newspaper that she was with 20 other refugees when they encountered the Texas law enforcement officers mid-river, shouting “Go back to Mexico!” But the migrants pressed forward, throwing blankets over the barbed concertina wire in the Rio Grande — only to see an officer who appeared to be a Texas state trooper, wearing a cowboy hat, yank the blanket away. One woman hit her head on a spike, as blood poured from a gash.

This was not an isolated incident. In a story first broken by the Houston Chronicle’s Benjamin Wermund, based on a whistleblowing email from a state trooper complaining of inhumane conditions at Eagle Pass, and then amplified by the Times’ reporting, we’ve learned the past week that troops under the massive Texas state border operation dubbed Operation Lone Star are committing shocking acts that arguably add up to domestic war crimes.

Troopers ordered to push migrant children back into the dangerous waters rather than allowing them to cross. Officers apparently following commands to deny water to the refugees despite the ongoing heat wave — even to pregnant women. In one instance, a 19-year-old woman who was caught up in the razor wire suffered a miscarriage. In another case, a 15-year-old boy reportedly suffered a broken leg in a deeper part of the river, not blocked by buoys.

Even worse, people are almost certainly dying because of the Abbott-backed border operations. The whistleblowing trooper noted in his email that five migrants recently drowned in a section of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, apparently seeking to cross in a section that was unguarded — because the waters there are more dangerous.

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These are some of the most abhorrent acts carried out on U.S. soil, or the edge of U.S. soil, that I’ve seen in my lifetime — especially considering both the scope of these atrocities and the open complicity of higher-ups in Texas government. Many have expressed righteous outrage — Beto O’Rourke, the ex-Democratic congressman who lost to Abbott in 2022, said the governor “has blood on his hands” — but it’s also important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Abbott’s Operation Lone Star is more than just inhumane. It’s the governor of America’s second-largest state building up his own military force that’s as suitable for Kandahar as for Eagle Pass — deploying Blackhawk helicopters and C-130 cargo planes to support the specially trained soldiers of what state officials called the Texas Border Tactical Force. Texas has spent an astronomical $4.5 billion on the project so far, deploying about 10,000 troops and law-enforcement officers at any given time — with no end in sight.

State national guards — under the ultimate control of a governor, responding to everything from floods to urban riots — are a long-standing convention, but everything about the Abbott mission feels off. It’s not only the massive scale and cost of Operation Lone Star, but the fact that these Texas troops aren’t working in concert with the federal government. Instead, Abbott has been clear that this is an effort in opposition to how he and other conservatives perceive President Joe Biden’s border policies. He tweeted last week: “The tragic humanitarian crisis on the border was created because of Biden’s refusal to secure the border.”

It’s more than noteworthy that Texas isn’t the only large Republican-red state with a politically ambitious governor that is amping up its military capacity in a way that Americans haven’t seen in more than 150 years. In Florida, the nation’s third-largest state, Gov. Ron DeSantis — also a 2024 presidential candidate — has reactivated and is now expanding Florida Guard troops under his control.

Although much smaller than the border army assembled by Texas’ Abbott — at least for now, with just 150 recruits accepted for the first batch, with a new goal of 1,500 — the effort has been beset by controversy so far. The New York Times recently reported that as many as one in five of the initial recruits quit or were dismissed amid dissatisfaction that a force pitched as largely disaster relief seems overly militarized. Some said it was more like “military fantasy camp” than prepping for hurricanes, and there have been allegations of abuse.

Among civil rights advocates, there is understandable fear about martial fantasies becoming reality, with DeSantis as commander-in-chief. The governor’s mission statement for the Florida Guard — which is buying boats and five aircraft — says these troops are “to ensure Florida remains fully fortified to respond to not only natural disasters, but also to protect its people and borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest.”

It seems not unreasonable to ask why the two largest states of the former Confederacy are building back their own armies, citing their own disagreements with the federal government. Indeed, it feels like another alarming downward spiral in the coming apart of America, as states with radically different cultures and now laws around everything from banning abortion to whitewashing slavery to the treatment of migrants look to enforce all of this at the barrel of a gun.

We talk so much these days about the possibility of another Civil War, and yet I think sometimes our imagination is stymied by images of blue-and-gray-clad troops lined up in rows at Manassas. That’s not happening again. Instead, a second American War Between the States looks a lot like the bloodstained barbed wire of Eagle Pass: leaders of a growing rebellion against federal authority unleashing their own militias on The Other, who today is a brown-skinned pregnant teen fleeing despair in Central America, and who tomorrow could be anyone who speaks up in dissent.

Greg Abbott’s sadistic war against refugees at the Rio Grande is demoralizing and dehumanizing, even for the troops the Texas governor has enlisted to fight it. National Guard members have complained about poor working conditions in Operation Lone Star and last-minute deployments, and officials are investigating whether these problems are linked to a wave of suicides among the troops. This mission should have been stopped a few billion dollars ago, not escalated into authoritarian cruelty.

Protecting the American border is a federal role, not a state function. The U.S. Border Patrol (which, of course, has its own problems) is unhappy about Texas’ violent blockade against these refugees, which is interfering with their right to reach U.S. soil and ask for asylum. On Thursday, the Justice Department wrote to Abbott and other Texas officials threatening to sue to have the buoys removed from the Rio Grande, calling them an “unlawful” risk to public safety, river commerce, and the authority of the federal government.

That’s a good start, but the Biden administration should do more — regardless of the perceived risks, political or otherwise — to halt this abomination against human rights before it gets even worse. It’s beyond Orwellian that the Texas governor claims he is addressing a “humanitarian crisis,” when in reality he is causing one.

But also the deeper threat to federal authority by these growing armies in Texas and Florida can no longer be ignored. We’ve seen this before from this part of the country — in 1861, and 1961 — and we shouldn’t take one more step down that bombed-out road. Our house is again divided against itself, and the atrocities of Eagle Pass should not be allowed to stand.

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