Hurd opened with a joke. “Oh, you want to ask me about the wall? I was figuring we’d talk about the Spurs,” he said. “We’re talking about the Spurs’ victory last night, is that right?” It was a chilly February morning in Washington, D.C., and Hurd, a Republican congressman representing Texas’s Twenty-third District, which includes more than a third of the U.S.-Mexico border, had just strolled into one of the U.S. Capitol’s television studios to answer questions from a local station back home. Dressed in a navy suit, red tie, and wing tips, he had folded his six-foot-four, 235-pound frame into the studio’s floral-upholstered armchair, and now he pressed his fingertips together in a contemplative pose. Hurd’s position on border security was no secret. Since December, when Donald Trump had forced a 35-day federal government shutdown because Congress wouldn’t give him $5.7 billion to fund his “big, beautiful” wall, Hurd had distinguished himself as one of the president’s most vocal opponents. He’d called the wall a “third-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem” in an interview with Rolling Stone. He’d told a panel on CBS This Morning that “building a wall from sea to shining sea” would be “the most expensive and…