Republican Texas Rep. Troy Nehls is demanding answers from the DOJ as to whether the department is emboldening the Dominican Republic’s preventive detention system against Americans.- Over 70% of all prisoners in the Dominican Republic are there under preventive detention, a system that requires no charges or evidence of crime for imprisonment, and some are likely American citizens.
- Nehls called on the DOJ’s inspector general to provide information as to whether the department’s criminal justice reform programs are being mismanaged on the taxpayer’s dime and used to make the Dominican Republic’s preventive detention system worse.
Republican Texas Rep. Troy Nehls has petitioned the inspector general of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether the department is backing programs that enforce preventive detention against Americans in the Dominican Republic, according to a letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
An unknown number of American citizens are currently imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, some of which are likely there under preventive detention, a system which requires no charges of evidence of crime for imprisonment. A variety of taxpayer-funded DOJ programs aimed at correcting the Dominican Republic’s criminal justice system may actually be bolstering the country’s preventive detention system being weaponized against Americans and “unreasonably denying” them due process, according to Nehls’ letter sent on Wednesday to Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
“I am calling on Inspector General Horowitz to immediately investigate whether taxpayer funds are being used to unlawfully detain individuals, such as American citizens, in foreign countries,” Nehls told the DCNF. “I look forward to reviewing DOJ’s findings and ensuring the thorough oversight of American taxpayer dollars.”
Rep. Nehls Letter to Inspector General Horowitz 09.13.23 (2) by Daily Caller News Foundation on Scribd.
The DOJ has worked to correct the criminal justice systems of certain countries through a number of reform programs funded by the U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID), including the Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development (OPDAT) and the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), according to Nehls’ letter. Nehls noted that in 2000, the then-inspector general testified before Congress and said DOJ officials involved with those programs had “engaged in potentially criminal misconduct and serious mismanagement.”
Those offices in question still operate out of the Dominican Republic today, Nehls wrote in the letter. Despite the DOJ attempting to correct the country’s criminal justice system through programs like OPDAT and ICITAP in recent years, currently 70% of prisoners in the Dominican Republic are held under preventive detention in prisons that are at 164% capacity.
“The country is still viewed by many to have an inadequate criminal system that is at a ‘crisis’ level,” Nehls wrote in his letter. “With the prospect that American citizens and legal permanent residents are being held in prison unjustly, it begs the question as to the accountability of these programs.”
“I urge you to thoroughly review these DOJ programs to determine whether taxpayer funds are supporting groups or entities that are holding American citizens and permanent residents in jail,” Nehls wrote.
In August, Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding answers on behalf of family members whose relatives were detained in the Dominican Republic. “Families of some of the detained individuals have approached this committee and the State Department seeking assistance and guidance during this distressing period. It is important to me that these families get the answers they need from their government, and nothing less,” McCaul wrote.
“It always goes back to the funding – we’re sending millions of dollars to the Dominican Republic… They used to pretend they were solving the preventive detention crisis,” Connie Mack, former Republican Florida congressman and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, previously told the DCNF. “But they don’t even bring it up anymore. It’s not even mentioned.”
Nehls gave Horowitz until Oct. 13 to respond to his query, according to the letter.
The DOJ inspector general and the State Department did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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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.