Opinion | The Ugly History at the Root of the Border Standoff

On Thursday, President Biden and Donald Trump separately toured strips of the border, flanked by federal and state agents. For both, there was an eerily similar use of border security backdrop, signaling the decisive role it and immigration will play in the election.

Their visits were but another reminder of how the border is used for political theater. Across South Texas, where I lived in recent years, I have repeatedly witnessed federal and state agents convert tiny slivers of the border into sites of violent spectacle. On a stretch of the Rio Grande where I went bird-watching, congressional delegations cruised the river in gunboats, wearing flak jackets.

To the west, in Eagle Pass, Gov. Greg Abbott authorized the installation of razor wire. He has accused Mr. Biden of attacking Texas and branded asylum seekers as invaders. He prevented federal Border Patrol agents from routine access to the riverbank, even after a Supreme Court ruling in January allowed agents to cut or remove the wire. In short order, Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, where the drama has been centered, became a destination for militias and religious zealots.

The Wild West-style politics surrounding the standoff between Texas and the federal government over Shelby Park has once again cast the border as a political theater, a place where the nation’s violent frontier history has been enacted time and again. The re-creation of that history has made the routine processing of asylum seekers into a menacing scene.

Pleas for the humanity of immigrants, as are so often made by Democrats who note we are a nation of immigrants, do little to combat today’s border war mentality. Immigration policy appears to be ancillary or even irrelevant to the border warriors’ goals. “The goal should be zero illegal crossings a day,” said the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who criticized the bipartisan border deal that was dead on arrival.

To understand the political and cultural forces that inspire this mentality, we can look to the slogan “Come and take it,” used by Republicans to express the ethos behind Texas’ intransigence. The slogan refers to the 1835 confrontation between white immigrants in the town of Gonzales and Mexico, the governing nation, after Mexican soldiers attempted to reclaim a cannon.