Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard.

The high-stakes game of Texas Hold ’em taking place on the banks of the Rio Grande between the tin soldiers of that state’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Border Patrol has reached a tension level that some writers and online pundits have compared to the standoff at Fort Sumter, the South Carolina outpost where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861.

That comparison might be a little unfair, though.

No one was actually killed* during the bombardment of the federal fort off Charleston by rebel forces of the newly formed Confederacy. But four migrants trying to reach U.S. soil at or near the disputed park in Eagle Pass, Texas, have drowned under circumstances that are arguably linked to the dispute between the militaristic approach of the Texas National Guard and the comparatively humane, locked-out agents of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Is Eagle Pass’ Shelby Park — which, in a you-can’t-make-this-up level of irony, is named for the rebel Gen. Joseph Orville Shelby, said to have planted the last Confederate battle flag in the river in 1865 as he fled to Mexico — the front line of a second American civil war? If so, its first casualties were a Mexican woman, 33-year-old Victerma de la Sancha Cerros, and her two children — her daughter, Yorlei Rubi, 10, and son, Jonathan Agustín, 8.

Mexican authorities alerted Border Patrol on Jan. 12 that five people trying to cross the chilly and heavily fortified with razor wire Rio Grande appeared to be in extreme distress near the park, once a key access point for federal agents that has been seized by Abbott’s Texas National Guard. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said state troops barred the feds from entering the park to attempt a rescue and also insisted there was no sign of trouble. Mexican authorities eventually recovered the bodies of de la Sancha Cerros and her two young children near the boat ramp where Border Patrol might have launched a rescue attempt.

Ten days after this tragedy, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to end the deadly stalemate when it ruled — in a rather surprising 5-4 split, given the massive weight of legal precedent favoring federal supremacy — that Border Patrol agents could resume removing the sharp razor wire Abbott’s ever-growing army has installed in the middle of the Rio Grande.

But Abbott — channeling the Confederate spirit of Gen. Shelby, who must be looking up from his fiery repose and smiling — won’t back down. Adopting the narrowest possible interpretation of the high court’s ruling, the Texas governor is not only not surrendering Shelby Park, but is putting even more razor wire up along the river at the site of frequent refugee crossings. On Tuesday, he posted photos on X/Twitter of a fortified river bank that looks like East Berlin in 1961 and declared, “The Texas National Guard is holding the line in Eagle Pass. Texas will not back down ...”

» READ MORE: The young Honduran drowned in Greg Abbott’s Texas had a name: Norlan Bayardo Herrera | Will Bunch

With a rebel yell, Abbott doubled down on Wednesday in a letter that accused Biden as the one who is violating immigration law with his border policies, as America struggles to cope with a long-running surge in refugees who are mostly fleeing gang violence, political repression, poverty, or a climate-induced drought in Central America. The governor, whose border bravado has cost Texas taxpayers an astronomical $10 billion, insists Texas has a constitutional right to protect itself from an “invasion,” pretending that desperate mothers and kids are instead the second coming of Pancho Villa.

Human beings continue to die during the standoff. Last Sunday, the body of yet another migrant — an unidentified male — was found in the Rio Grande just downriver from Shelby Park. And Mexican officials are rescuing others suffering from hypothermia in the rapid and freezing cold January currents.

Abbott’s reckless, cruelty-is-the-point policies and his defiant stand are also posing the greatest threat to federal authority since the South’s “massive resistance” in the 1950s and ‘60s to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that mandated school integration. This is, of course, not happening in a vacuum, but right in the middle of a presidential election that will determine whether the United States can continue as a flawed democracy that still honors constitutional norms, or embrace the paranoid style of Abbott’s GOP.

It felt like no coincidence that Abbott’s tough talk came on the same day his party’s wannabe dictator, Donald Trump, won a commanding victory in the bellwether New Hampshire primary that all but ensured him the GOP nomination this summer in Milwaukee, ahead of a rematch with Biden. Republican voters in the Granite State ranked immigration their number one issue (it is a border state ... with Canada), and Team Trump along with Abbott seem eager to milk a fascist-style war against these brown-skinned “invaders” between now and November.

The small-d democratic institutions that could at least ameliorate this humanitarian crisis at the southern border are failing, miserably. None more so than Congress, stymied by the GOP’s ability to thwart legislation. Biden has worked to forge a compromise that would adopt some of the Republicans’ more draconian strategies, in return for gains like more immigration judges to handle asylum cases and quicker work permits for refugees. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told a closed-door caucus that Trump has told his GOP allies to block any positive action at the border that might aid Biden. Apparently, more bloated corpses will boost the party’s odds in November.

But equally concerning, if not more so, is the incredibly shrinking Supreme Court. Constitutional scholars seemed shocked that four of the court’s six conservative justices would side with Abbott on what should have been a slam-dunk unanimous case for federal authority on the border. It bodes poorly for the rest of 2024, when the high court will be making life-or-death-for-democracy decisions about Trump’s many legal tangles. But Abbott’s massive resistance also speaks to how diminished the ethically challenged court, with its near record-low public trust, has become.

Not for the first time in his tumultuous 46th presidency, Biden is in a bind. Until now, the president and his Homeland Security team have placed their faith in legal challenges they believed would restore access to Shelby Park — which had been a processing center for asylum-seekers — and allow them to tear down this wall in the Rio Grande. This week’s developments show this plan isn’t working. There are other options available to the White House — echoing difficult choices by some of Biden’s historically revered predecessors — but the political risks in an election year are huge.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a similar dilemma in 1957, in the Arkansas capital of Little Rock. In what became a major national crisis, Arkansas’ then-Gov. Orval Faubus called up his state’s National Guard to essentially side with an angry mob that was preventing nine Black students from integrating Little Rock Central High School, in compliance with the Supreme Court ruling.

After the stalemate dragged on for nearly three weeks that September, a reluctant Ike finally issued an executive order that federalized the Arkansas National Guard, forcing its troops to follow U.S. military command and allow the nine students to enter the school. For good measure, the 34th president invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 and called in the storied 101st Airborne Division to initially escort the trailblazing Black students. Although Eisenhower held fairly retrograde personal views on race, history has judged his move as an important forward step in the long slog toward integration.

In Eagle Pass, Biden has been presented with only two choices. The first is to back down in the face of Abbott’s defiance, not only looking weak and ineffectual but ensuring more asylum-seekers will die needlessly. The other is to be like Ike and federalize the Texas National Guard, order Abbott’s confederates to retreat from Shelby Park, remove the illegal razor wire and fencing, and resume the humane processing of undocumented refugees.

It won’t be an easy decision. The possibility for a Fort Sumter-style gunpowder spark exists in this crazy, mixed-up nation. If Biden does successfully reassert control of Eagle Pass, the same brand of yahoo who screamed “states’ rights” in the 1950s and ‘60s to justify Jim Crow racial apartheid will yell that the American dictator is Biden, not Trump. And if the 45th president does return as 47th, he would cite Biden’s justified actions as an excuse for wildly unconstitutional uses of the Insurrection Act to crush political dissent with tanks and occupy cities run by Democrats.

If Biden is the one who backs down at Eagle Pass, then — at the risk of paraphrasing Trump — we won’t have a country anymore. I strongly agree with sensible Texans like U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro that it’s past time for the president to federalize the Texas National Guard and order an end to this wasteful and immoral travesty. The difficult decisions that are needed to preserve the constitutional rule of law in America simply cannot wait for the November election.

* Yes, history buffs, one Union soldier did die at Fort Sumter: not in battle, but by a freak cannon explosion during a 100-gun salute to mark their retreat.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter