(DCNF)—Smugglers living along key migration routes thrived off the U.S. border crisis, but are now left with next to no income after illegal migrants have largely given up trying to reach the southern border under the Trump administration’s watch.
Residents living in the Darien Gap — a vast jungle region between Colombia and Panama that serves as a pivotal way station for northbound migrants — took advantage of the endless number of illegal immigrants who trekked across their lands during the Biden-era, according to locals who spoke with the Associated Press. Noticing an opportunity from those that needed to be ferried across water, many residents invested in boats and charged migrants for passage, earning income substantially higher than their local average.
However, the economic landscape changed drastically after President Donald Trump entered office and quickly began instituting hardline policies that kept illegal immigration at bay.
“When Donald Trump won, everything came to a screeching halt,” Zobeida Concepcion, a woman living with her family in Lajas Blancas, a major river port destination in Panama for boats dropping off migrants, said to the AP.
Illegal immigration into the U.S. exploded during the Biden administration, with fiscal years 2023 and 2024 being the two worst years for total migrant encounters, according to Customs and Border Protection data. Many of these migrants previously crossed the Darien Gap, with over half a million migrants having passed through the region in 2023 — roughly double the nearly 250,000 that had crossed the year prior.
As the migrants began to roll in, so did the money. Many migrants crossing the Darien Gap paid for boat rides, food, clothing and water, infusing cash into incredibly remote areas that were accustomed to poverty.
Previously growing plantains or other crops for a living, many of the families living in the region switched to smuggling, according to the AP. Boat pilots, referred to as “lancheros,” could make as much as $300 a day, far more than the $150 a month locals were earning from crops.
Luis Olea, like others in his town of Villa Caleta, Panama, abandoned his crops and invested in a boat, he told the AP. Off the money he earned ferrying U.S.-bound illegal migrants, he installed electricity in his home, bought a television, purchased a water pump, elevated his house and installed solar panels on top of his roof.
However, Olea was no longer able to profit off the immigration crisis after migrants largely gave up on reaching the U.S.-Mexico border. His boat to carry migrants now sits idle and unused.
“Before, we lived off of the migration,” Olea said to the AP. “But now that’s all gone.”
Upon entering office, Trump immediately embarked on a number of executive orders and policy changes that drastically tightened border security and prompted many would-be illegal migrants to not even bother trying to enter.
The Trump administration deployed troops to the border, deputized agents across numerous federal agencies with immigration enforcement authorities and secured a massive amount of detention space outside of the country.
In addition to militarizing the U.S. side of the southern border, Trump successfully wielded the threat of tariffs to coerce Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum into deploying 10,000 members of her own national guard to bolster border security in the region. A very similar victory was made at the northern border, where former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to beef up border security to avoid sweeping tariffs on his country’s exports.
Once under an unprecedented crisis, immigration officials are now reporting the lowest number of migrant encounters at the southern border in history. Border Patrol agents counted roughly 7,180 crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border during March — a far cry from the monthly average of 155,000 border crossings from the previous four years.
While Trump has worked to reduce illegal immigration into the U.S., his efforts have been assisted by Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino, who was elected into office on the promise of reducing illegal travel across his country.
Other Panamanian locals who took advantage of the American crisis reported similar despair at the changing economic landscape.
“I’m trying this to see if things get better, see if I can buy some food,” Pedro Chami, another former boat pilot who gave up on his crops to ferry migrants, said to the AP. “Before, I would always have my $200 a day without fail.”
“Now, I don’t even have a cent,” Chami continued.
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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.
