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Most people know by now about the border war between Texas and the United States playing out along the banks of the Rio Grande. Less obvious, but no less consequential, is an emerging border war inside the Supreme Court.

At the physical border are 29 miles of coiled razor wire on the U.S. side of the river, put in place by the Texas National Guard on orders from Gov. Greg Abbott. Its ostensible purpose is to stop what Abbott, a Republican, calls an unchecked "invasion" of undocumented migrants.

It has had the added and hardly unpredictable effect of barring access to the border by the federal Border Patrol agents. The agents responded by cutting some of the wire. Texas in turn sued the federal government for, of all things, trespass.

The state lost in Federal District Court on the grounds that the U.S. is immune from suits of this type. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit gave Texas what it wanted: an injunction to bar border patrol agents from tampering with the wires, except for rescue operations, to last until the appeals court decides the legal merits of the state's case. The court is scheduled to hear arguments on the case on Wednesday.

In contrast to the actual border, the line inside the Supreme Court that I call the notional border divides the two groups of justices who responded in opposite ways to the federal government's urgent request to vacate the Fifth Circuit's injunction. A bare majority of five justices granted the government's application. The other four — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have left it in place.

Obviously, Supreme Court justices take opposite sides on all kinds of cases, and we don't ascribe their differences to an internal border war. But the metaphor is apt in the context of a case that raises such a profound issue of governing authority, one that has largely lain dormant since the days when Southern governors stood in schoolhouse doors in defiance of desegregation orders.

When, if ever, can a state defy the federal government? Does the long-established supremacy of federal law simply evaporate at the hand of state-sympathizing judges? It's hard to think of questions more central to how we govern ourselves, or more resonant with past crises caused by the demagogic flouting of established norms of federal-state behavior.

As is common when the Supreme Court rules on emergency matters on what has come to be known as its "shadow docket," neither group of justices wrote anything to explain themselves. That leaves the rest of us to draw our own conclusions, and I have drawn mine. For four justices to have voted to allow Texas to keep the upper hand in this dispute was shocking.

I have to assume that the four read the government's emergency application that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed on Jan. 2. Asserting that the Fifth Circuit's injunction "directly interferes with the government's enforcement of federal law," she reminded the court of the "deeply rooted principle that under the Supremacy Clause, state laws cannot control the activities of federal agents acting under federal authority." The injunction, she wrote, "defies an unbroken line of precedent" dating to the Supreme Court's earliest decisions on the relationship of the federal government to the states.

The response that the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed is almost laughable in its effort to bury the implications of the state's position. "This narrow, fact-bound dispute" doesn't merit the court's attention, the attorney general wrote, observing that "the Fifth Circuit's injunction implicates one four-mile stretch of the 1,951 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border." That's like claiming that the case the Supreme Court will hear this coming week on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump's presidential candidacy is unimportant because the dispute is over his eligibility for the Republican primary in only one of the 50 states.

"Defendants admit that they destroy property that does not belong to them," the state whines in its brief. "Texas holds a proprietary interest in its fencing." No doubt it does, but the question is whether Texas had the right to place its razor wire in a way that obstructs federal agents who have every right, indeed a duty, to be there. A federal law dating to 1952 gives the federal government essentially free rein in a zone that extends 25 miles inland from all the country's borders.

In any event, this case is no more about a fence than the potential landmark administrative law case that was argued in January was about the fishing boat owners in whose name that case was brought. That case, along with a similar one, concern what's known as the Chevron doctrine and could upend federal regulations on matters ranging from health care to the environment.

The point is, cases are always about issues, not about tangible objects nor, with rare exceptions, about individuals. The justices know this. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said as much in recent remarks at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. "By the time you come to the Supreme Court, it's not about your client anymore," she said. "It's not about their case. It's about how that legal issue will affect the development of law."

So what is this case, Department of Homeland Security v. Texas, really about? It's the playing out of the declaration of war in an audacious letter that Abbott sent to President Joe Biden more than a year ago, in November 2022. Addressing the president as something less than a peer head of state, the Texas governor accused him of a "sustained dereliction of duty" in not adequately enforcing federal immigration law. Consequently, Abbott continued, Texas was forced to invoke the U.S. Constitution's Article I, Section 3, Clause 10, which provides that no state shall "engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay."

Using a metaphor for war, the governor declared that the influx of migrants is an actual "invasion," explaining: "Using that authority, Texas will escalate our efforts to repel and turn back any immigrant who seeks to enter our state at a border crossing that Congress has designated as illegal; to return to the border those who do cross illegally; and to arrest criminals who violate Texas law." In other words, Texas would take immigration enforcement into its own hands, as it subsequently did by placing a 1,000-foot-long floating barrier in the Rio Grande and by enacting a law known as S.B. 4, which makes it a state crime for a noncitizen to violate federal immigration law. The Biden administration has sued Texas over both moves. It's hard to see either case stopping short of the Supreme Court.

What part of this multipronged power struggle don't the dissenting justices understand? Or maybe they understand it perfectly well, and Texas has presented them with just the vehicle they have been waiting for to enable the Supreme Court to undo decades, if not centuries of federal supremacy. Of course, they are only four, and accomplishing anything at the Supreme Court takes five votes. But we've been down this road before with this group, who needed only Justice Amy Coney Barrett's vote to finally overturn Roe v. Wade nearly 50 years after it was decided. The border is long and, when it comes to these justices, so is their patience.

Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for the New York Times Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Times Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021. This article originally appeared in the Times.