(The Epoch Times)—The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has arrested and detained more than 17,500 criminal illegal immigrants under the Laken Riley Act, the department said in a Dec. 24 statement.
The Laken Riley Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Jan. 29, in honor of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Hope Riley from Georgia, who was murdered by a Venezuelan illegal immigrant in February 2024.
The Act requires DHS to detain illegal immigrants who have been arrested for theft, burglary, shoplifting, or larceny. It also allows states to sue the federal government for any violation of federal immigration laws that endanger American citizens.
Earlier this week, DHS cited results from Operation Angel’s Honor, a 14-day nationwide operation launched in honor of Riley that targeted illegal immigrants who committed crimes that come under the purview of the Laken Riley Act.
During the operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested 1,030 criminal illegal immigrants, the department said.
Some of the arrested individuals include a Cuban illegal immigrant convicted of 17 counts of larceny, a Guatemalan national charged with cruelty toward a child and convicted of aggravated assault on an officer, a Jamaican illegal immigrant convicted of sexual assault, and a Mexican national convicted of kidnapping and drug possession.
According to the DHS, Riley’s murderer was a “member of the Tren de Aragua, who was previously arrested and released into the United States under the Biden administration in September 2022.” Tren de Aragua was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department in February.
“He was previously arrested by NYPD for acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and released back into American neighborhoods. He then went on to commit the heinous murder of Laken Riley,” the DHS statement said.
Riley went missing on Feb. 22, 2024, during her morning jog around a wooded area at the University of Georgia. Her body was discovered along her usual route later the same day after a friend reported her missing when she failed to return to her campus.
Riley was murdered by Jose Antonio Ibarra, who was previously arrested and released several times for various offenses, including theft.
“President Trump has empowered us to arrest and remove the millions of violent criminal illegal aliens unleashed on the United States by the previous administration,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said.
“Now, these criminals will face justice and be removed from our country. We can never bring Laken back, but we can do everything in our power to bring these heinous criminals to justice.”
The Laken Riley Act faced opposition from some groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Before Trump signed the Act into law, the ACLU said the legislation was exploiting Riley’s death to escalate a “false, xenophobic narrative about immigrants.”
Sarah Mehta, ACLU senior border policy counsel, alleged that the bill would strengthen Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
“It will force immigration authorities to detain individuals accused of nonviolent theft offenses like shoplifting regardless of whether or not law enforcement even deems them as a threat,” Mehta said.
In a Jan. 22 statement, two days after Trump began his second term, the Executive Office of the President supported the need for the bipartisan Laken Riley Act.
“This commonsense legislation would provide law enforcement with the tools they need to protect our communities and prevent future senseless tragedies, and is consistent with the Administration’s broader efforts to strengthen enforcement of our immigration laws and improve the security of the Nation’s borders,” the statement said.
The DHS said in a Dec. 19 statement that the department has deported “hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens” under the Trump administration, including kidnappers, rapists, drug traffickers, and gang members.
Multiple operations have been carried out to arrest criminal illegal immigrants, it said. For instance, in Chicago and the Midwest, Operation Midway Blitz resulted in the arrests of more than 4,500 illegal immigrants. In Portland, Oregon, Operation Black Rose has led to the arrests of more than 1,240 illegal immigrants.
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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.