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 laying the ground for a civil war.

Two thousand miles apart, Biden administration leaders in Washington, D.C., and Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) 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.