Throughout January, a right-wing militant group based out of North Carolina called upon supporters to travel to a small Texas border town to “gather” and help “do the work of closing our borders.”

“By Ballot, by choice,” the group’s website promised. “By Bullet if forced. The Republic will be Restored.”

Mike Garcia, a resident of Eagle Pass, Texas—the small town in question—heard about the North Carolina visitors from a reporter who gave him and some other locals a heads-up. “We were freaking out,” Garcia said. He and a group of residents alerted a nearby high school and others in the community. And soon enough, on Jan. 20, Garcia saw what were undeniably a couple of outsiders driving around the local Shelby Park. (“When you’re 98 percent Hispanic, and somebody who’s white with a big beard, looking like they came from Duck Dynasty—they stick out,” he said.) The outsiders drove their pickup trucks slowly by the gate of the park, peering out their windows, looking past the concertina wire and National Guardsmen and state troopers for drama.

But as far as Garcia could tell, the trip was a dud; the visitors expected to see an area overrun with migrants and immigration officials, but they arrived at a time when the area’s migrant processing had been redirected to a different location. “They were disappointed,” Garcia said, “because there were no immigrants.”

The encounter was just one episode exemplifying the absurdity of life right now in Eagle Pass; already, a second, more organized and publicized caravan of anti-immigration protesters is working its way south toward the city. In recent months, the town of 28,000 has transformed from a relatively quiet international commerce waypoint into a destination for conservative livestreaming and speechmaking. As the maneuvering in Washington over border politics heats up—the GOP is moving to impeach the Homeland Security director, and Republicans are working to kill a strict but bipartisan border deal, seemingly in order to preserve their own campaign rallying cry—Eagle Pass has become the site of a turf war between the federal and state government, and a focal point in political posturing around the border.

The mostly Mexican American residents of Eagle Pass—which abuts the town of Piedras Negras in Mexico across the Rio Grande—have long understood bureaucratic snags and political whims to be a part of a border town’s operations. But recently, with a spike in migrant crossings and the Republican Party’s corresponding decision to make immigration a key issue of the 2024 campaign season, the political wrangling has reached a new high.

Over the past few years, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been feuding with the Biden administration, pitting federal Border Patrol against Abbott’s Texas National Guard and state troopers in a conflict for control over the border. Eagle Pass’ mayor, Ronaldo Salinas Jr., said that at some point the town must have developed a reputation as one of the safest crossing points from Mexico; as migrants changed course to come through Eagle Pass, a complex shift in immigration factors left the city overwhelmed and heavily scrutinized this winter. During one week in late December, 12,000 undocumented immigrants crossed into the city’s territory.

Eagle Pass’ 47-acre Shelby Park encompasses much of the city’s access to the river and serves as a natural staging area for immigration agents. As the park became something of a hub for migrant encounters, tensions between the federal and Texas immigration enforcement authorities only grew.

Things came to a head on Jan. 10, when Abbott sent state troopers to take over Shelby Park, claiming that the Biden administration had abdicated its right to manage the area. The troopers blocked federal Border Patrol agents from entering the park, surrounded it with razor wire, and set up armed guards at its entrance. The fight over Shelby Park escalated to the point that the Supreme Court, the Biden administration, almost every Republican governor in the country, and former President Donald Trump........

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