As always there are no good guys here. The Federal government is not acting like the good guy here. They have been amazingly negligent, and TX has a legitimate and strong grievance, but the feds are very clearly in "We DGAF, FAFO" mode. It's amazing to think the feds aren't even trying to address TX's grievances which are legitimate, and they are doing this over essentially defending illegal immigration, which is a strange cause to choose, except I guess it lands so firmly in federal purview. I think about how this will be explained to future school children, but of course we can see how it's being pitched in the contemporary media already...defending the feds will be awkward, like trying to explain actions motivated by slavery preservation. Little Timmy asks "Teacher, why did the federal government take such action?" and the real answer will be "because 2 million people per year were coming into the US illegally, and TX was trying to stop it, and the feds wanted it to continue". But actually they will either dodge the issue, and downplay it I guess, and claim it was a federal action to preserve federal supremacy and try to avoid mentioning they were doing it to preserve the "institution of open borders".
All the same, Abbot can't win this one and I don't know what his angle is. Don't forget Little Rock after Brown vs. Board of education, where Arkansas took a similar stance and their national guard was simply federalized and used against them to enforce federal will. I don't see how that won't simply happen again.