Ulysses S. Grant once said that the Confederate cause, the defense of chattel slavery, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Texas’s embrace of neo-secessionist rhetoric in defense of letting children drown in the Rio Grande belongs somewhere on that same list. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is engaged in a number of legal battles with the Biden administration over immigration. One of them involves Abbott ordering the Texas National Guard to set up razor wire and floating barriers in an effort to deter migrants. The federal government argues that those barriers have also blocked Border Patrol from being able to arrest and process migrants in accordance with federal law. Earlier this month, a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande, the river that runs along the border with Mexico. A short time later, when Border Patrol was alerted to two other migrants in distress, national guardsmen reportedly prevented federal agents from reaching them. In 2023, the Houston Chronicle reported that …