Everything to know about the Texas-Biden border impasse

Unanswered pleas for help amid a historic influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border have sparked a federal-state battle three years in the making, a feud that has been teased as potentially laying the ground for a civil war.

Two thousand miles apart, Biden administration leaders in Washington, D.C., and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration in Austin are carefully considering the next move in what has escalated slowly and now at a mounting pace into a showdown of states’ rights on international matters.

When did the fight begin?

The border crisis itself began in February 2021, just weeks after President Joe Biden took office and rescinded a plethora of Trump-era immigration policies, and the number of illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border topped 100,000 that month alone.