(The Center Square)–Under new Trump administration policies, more than 2.5 million people were removed from the U.S. this year, including a record number of violent offenders.
This includes 622,000 who were deported and 1.9 million who self-deported, according to year-end Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs data.
The Trump administration directed targeted ICE enforcement and removal operations nationwide, involving multiple federal, state and local law enforcement partners.
The majority arrested, 70%, had criminal records. Large percentages included men who were previously deported, including multiple times, and had final removal orders from federal immigration judges. Even during the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history, ICE continued to apprehend violent offenders. In Houston alone they arrested nearly 3,600, The Center Square reported.
Targeted operations began in so-called sanctuary cities where Democratic governors and mayors ordered law enforcement not to cooperate with federal immigration efforts.
In Massachusetts, during Operation Patriot 1.0 and Patriot 2.0, ICE arrested more than 2,860. During Patriot 2.0, out of 1,400 arrested, more than 600 were convicted felons, had pending criminal charges or were known foreign fugitives; 277 had removal orders, three were known or suspected terrorists, The Center Square reported.
In Chicago, ICE and Border Patrol launched Operation Midway Blitz, arresting more than 4,500. Federal agents were the targets of drive-by shootings, assassination hits and vehicular attacks, The Center Square reported.
In Los Angeles, more than 10,000 illegal foreign nationals were arrested. Americans who targeted ICE officers were also arrested for doxxing, threatening them and their family members and assaulting them, The Center Square reported.
In the Minneapolis area, ICE arrested more than 670 in “Operation Metro Surge.” In “Operation Twin Shield,” ICE worked with federal agents who uncovered extensive immigration fraud, The Center Square reported.
In Portland, Oregon, ICE arrested more than 1,240 in Operation Black Rose.
Enforcement actions continued this year as attacks against ICE increased by 1,000% and death threats increased by 8,000%, The Center Square reported.
ICE and Border Patrol also experienced an historic surge of vehicular attacks this year, The Center Square reported.
Enforcement actions also expanded at the local level through ICE’s 287(g) program. In May, ICE called on law enforcement to support its efforts. As of Dec. 23, ICE has signed 1,255 Memorandums of Agreement with law enforcement agencies in 40 states.
Florida led the U.S. with the most 287(g) agreements this year. ICE also launched the first 287(g) operation of its kind this year in Florida. Through Operation Tidal Wave, ICE and Florida law enforcement arrested more than 1,100 criminal foreign nationals in six days.
ICE also launched new partnerships with Republican-led states to expand detention space this year. This included opening Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, the Speedway Slammer in Indiana, the Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska and Louisiana Lockup in Louisiana.
DHS also launched a new website to show Americans where noncitizens were arrested by state and city. Their criminal histories include murder, aggravated assault, burglary or theft, weapons offenses, aggravated kidnapping, drug and human trafficking and smuggling, making terroristic threats, hit-and-run, arson, violent sexual assaults, multiple aggravated child sex crimes, among others. Those arrested were wanted fugitives, members of foreign terrorist organizations and gang members, The Center Square reported.
The Trump administration terminated parole programs that had been used to release millions of inadmissible foreign nationals into the U.S., including the CBP One app, The Center Square reported.
It was repurposed as a new CBP Home app, through which eligible foreign nationals receive a $1,000 stipend and free flight to return to their country of origin. This year, more than 1.9 million foreign nationals used the app to self-deport for the first time in U.S. history.
DHS also launched Project Homecoming in May, using chartered flights to return individuals and families, including young children, to their home countries. They received travel assistance and a $1,000 stipend, The Center Square reported.
The removal effort was unprecedented. It was also a marked reversal of Biden administration policies that ushered in at least more than 14 million illegal border crossers, The Center Square reported.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.