(Newsbusters)—Imagine local sheriffs who actually comply with federal immigration law. What a concept.
Perhaps The New Yorker magazine is more comfortable with local police officials who defy such laws because their jurisdiction is in sanctuary cities. However, when faced with the reality that many sheriffs around the nation are more than willing to comply with federal law in order to protect their citizens, the New Yorker finds this problematic as you can see in their Thursday story by Jessica Pishko, “How Sheriffs Might Power Trump’s Deportation Machine.”
Pishko finds it highly problematic that local sheriffs are willing to cooperate with the deportation policies of incoming President Donald Trump and his designated no-nonsense “Border Czar” Tom Homan.
Both Trump and Homan have indicated that local law enforcement would be involved in carrying out the mass-deportation plan. Ryan Zinke, a Republican representative for Montana, who served as Trump’s first Secretary of the Interior, declared, “The sheriffs know the bad characters.” And there’s an advantage to the county sheriff in particular: nearly all of them are elected officers who are not beholden to other officials, even blue-state governors, many of whom have shown a willingness to work with Trump anyway.
Because immigration is in the realm of federal law, the role of local law enforcement in policing the border has historically been limited. But, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which expanded the criminal charges for which a person could be subject to deportation. As immigration became linked to criminal law, local law enforcement—especially county sheriffs, who enjoy relative autonomy free from direct oversight and have jurisdiction over much larger areas than, say, urban police departments—began to play a critical role in the deportation machine. In counties along the U.S. border, sheriffs receive funding, through a FEMA grant program called Operation Stonegarden, to purchase equipment such as snowmobiles and squad cars for use in conjunction with Border Patrol.
Ironic that it was a Democrat president who made it easier for sheriff’s to aid in the deportation of those in the USA illegally. Of course, that was an era before Democrats encouraged open border policies to the extent of defying federal immigration law via sanctuary cities.
Because most sheriffs are elected, governors or attorneys general have little power over them. They are excluded from the Hatch Act, which bars some government employees from engaging in political activity while on the job, and largely permitted to campaign in uniform. They can make decisions about department policy without seeking approval and with low risk of public opprobrium. They often voice political opinions; before the Presidential election, one Ohio sheriff went so far as to threaten residents who publicly supported Kamala Harris. In a 2021 fund-raising letter, the Claremont Institute—a conservative think tank that the Times has called a “nerve center of the American right,” and a part of the advisory board for Project 2025—asserted that sheriffs have “jurisdictional latitude.” In the institute’s view, this “places them on the front lines of the defense of civilization.”
For that reason, Claremont—alongside other anti-immigration groups, such as FAIR, whose new “law enforcement advisor” is Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a Homan collaborator—has turned its focus to recruiting and training sheriffs to help execute its agenda. In 2021, it created an annual weeklong retreat called the Sheriffs Fellowship, which received funding from Betsy DeVos, “to study and discuss the political-philosophical, institutional, and historical arc leading from the American Founding to today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism,” according to a promotional brochure sent to potential applicants.
Notice that conflation of “anti-immigration” with enforcing immigration law by Pishko? We saw what you did there. Oh, and nice touch by nefariously describing Sheriff Mark Lamb as a “Homan collaborator.” You can almost read swastikas between the lines.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
