(Just The News)—Illegal border crossings continued a downward historic trajectory in October and November, representing the lowest numbers ever reported at the beginning of a fiscal year in recorded U.S. history. The fiscal year goes from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.
In October, 30,573 illegal border crosser apprehensions/encounters were reported nationwide – a massive drop from 142,742 in October 2024, 309,605 in October 2023 and 278,317 in October 2022, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
According to preliminary data for November, illegal border crosser apprehensions and encounters nationwide were slightly lower – 30,367.
The numbers include apprehensions made by Border Patrol agents nationwide between ports of entry and by CBP agents at ports of entry.
“Our focus is unwavering: secure the border, enforce the law, and protect this nation,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said. “These numbers reflect the tireless efforts of our agents and officers who are delivering results that redefine border security. We’re not slowing down. We’re setting the pace for the future.”
The total encounters in October and November – 60,940 – are lower than all of the first two months of any fiscal year to date. The next lowest number was reported in fiscal 2012 of 84,293, according to CBP data.
Notably, the total number of illegal border crossers apprehended in the first 10 months of the Trump administration were less than the number of foreign nationals who illegally entered the country under the Biden administration in one month.
From Jan. 21 through end of November, there were 117,105 total illegal border crosser apprehensions along the southwest border, 37% less than the monthly average of 185,625 during the Biden administration, according to the data.
Border Patrol apprehensions averaged less than 10,000 a month at the southwest border since President Donald Trump took office, “a level of deterrence unmatched in modern border history,” Scott said.
Average apprehensions along the southwest border totaled 245 per day, less than 11 people per hour. That’s 95% lower than the daily average under the Biden administration, which saw the highest numbers in recorded U.S. history. From February 2021 through December 2024, Border Patrol agents faced a minimum of 5,110 apprehensions a day along the southwest border, according to CBP data.
In December 2023, at the height of the border crisis, with December being a normally slow winter month, 336 illegal border crossers were apprehended every hour. That’s more than the daily total of apprehensions under the Trump administration.
Every month and every year the greatest number of illegal border crossers were single adults, followed by single adults claiming to be in a family unit, and unaccompanied children, according to the data.
The data excludes “gotaways,” the official CBP term for foreign nationals who illegally enter between ports of entry to evade capture. They don’t make immigration claims and don’t return to Mexico or Canada. The majority have been found to have criminal records or were previously deported, authorities have said.
CBP doesn’t publicly release gotaway data. The Center Square exclusively obtained it from a Border Patrol agent every month, revealing that more than two million gotaways were recorded by Border Patrol agents during the Biden administration. The total is expected to be much higher because not all gotaways were reported.
As record numbers of illegal border crossers poured through, Border Patrol agents were pulled from the field to process them into the country contrary to federal law, creating a national security crisis, they argued.
Retired San Diego Chief Border Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke testified before Congress that Border Patrol agents across the southwest border were taken out of the field to process everyone into the country, including “groups of hundreds and thousands coming into the United States and turning themselves in.” The result was “80% to 90%, sometimes 100% of the agents on duty [were taken] away from” the southwest border. Hundreds of miles of the border were left unstaffed, unprotected and unpatrolled where there was “no agent presence for weeks and months at a time,” he said, The Center Square reported.
Foreign nationals “who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. … We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time.”
Under the Trump administration, Border Patrol agents were put back in the field, Biden administration policies were reversed and illegal border crossers aren’t being released but processed for removal.
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.
