Members of the Texas National Guard on duty in Eagle Pass. Liu Jie/Xinhua/ZUMA

Joshua Rubin, a Brooklyn software developer and founder of the pro-immigrant grassroots group Witness at the Border, spent his 72nd birthday in Eagle Pass, Texas. He gathered with another half a dozen volunteers at the border town across from Mexico’s Piedras Negras for a two-week vigil “to, according to the organization, “stand up against [Governor] Greg Abbott’s racist and inhumane regime,”

They carried vinyl banners that read “Justice for Migrants” and “Give Back Shelby Park,” a reference to the 47-acre field on the banks of the Rio Grande named after a Confederate general that Abbot and his $10 billion Operation Lone Star have turned into a razor wire-enclosed outpost for Texas state forces. On the Mexico side, a sign in Spanish warns potential crossers of the dangers of the floating barrier made of buoys with sharp metal disks between them: “People have died; look for another path, please.”

“There’s so much concertina here, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to rescue the river,” Rubin says of the wire-fencing Gov. Abbott put up along the Rio Grande to prevent migrants........

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