Reuters published an exclusive this week revealing that more than 12,000 people have been arrested by immigration authorities during President Trump’s second term after tips from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that houses unaccompanied migrant children.
According to internal government data reviewed by Reuters, ORR has shared more than 460,000 leads with ICE since January 2025 concerning unaccompanied children, their sponsors, and other household members.
The framing of the piece is unmistakable. A former Biden-era ORR deputy director, Jen Smyers, delivers the thesis Reuters wants readers to carry away, claiming officials are “weaponizing a child welfare program for the purposes of more deportations.”
The human-interest anchors are sympathetic by design, and some of the individual stories are genuinely painful. But strip away the framing and what Reuters has actually documented is this. The wall that once stood between America’s child migrant bureaucracy and America’s immigration law has been torn down. That wall was the scandal, not its removal.
The Firewall Built the Pipeline
For years, the arrangement worked like a machine. A 2008 law required unaccompanied children to be released from federal custody to sponsors as quickly as safely possible regardless of the sponsor’s legal status, and ORR was functionally forbidden from sharing sponsor information with immigration enforcement.
Every incentive that mattered pointed in one direction. Send the child north alone, or pay a smuggler to do it, and the United States government would complete the delivery to an adult it would not vet against immigration law and would not follow up on.
Reuters describes this in its own reporting. One mother profiled in the piece entered the country illegally, then had a relative bring her six-year-old to the border and leave her to surrender to agents, which Reuters calls a common strategy among families seeking reunification.
Common indeed. It was common because the firewall guaranteed it would work. The federal government spent years operating the last leg of a smuggling route and calling it child welfare.
The results were catastrophic and documented long before Trump returned to office. A February 2024 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General found the government had failed to keep track of enormous numbers of released children. In March 2025, HHS identified a backlog of more than 65,000 reports concerning unaccompanied children that had simply been ignored during the previous administration, reports that, once processed, generated thousands of investigative leads involving fraud and human trafficking.
What the Welfare Checks Actually Found
The administration’s answer was the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, launched in November 2025 with state and local 287(g) partners to physically locate children released to sponsors the previous administration never properly screened. ICE has reported finding sponsors in possession of child sexual abuse material, sponsors who forced minors into labor, and children living in conditions amounting to neglect.
Individual sponsors arrested under the initiative had prior records including aggravated assault and armed robbery, according to DHS.
By June of this year, officials announced substantial progress. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin put it plainly at a Justice Department press conference. “We found 146,000 kids so far. We still have nearly 300,000 missing.”
Fact-checkers quibble with the word missing, arguing that a child the government released and then lost track of is not technically a missing person. That is a distinction that should comfort no one. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described sponsors who used fake identities and false claims of kinship to obtain custody of multiple children, according to reporting on the announcement.
This is the context Reuters buries beneath its narrative. Yes, sponsors are being arrested, including some who appear to have no criminal history beyond illegal entry. Yes, children are spending longer in shelters, an average of 194 days now versus 30 in fiscal year 2024, because fingerprinting entire households takes time.
Those are real costs, and honest people can weigh them. But the alternative was the system we just escaped, one in which the vetting was so thin that traffickers passed it, abuse reports piled up unread by the tens of thousands, and the government’s official position was that it had no obligation to know where the children went.
Compassion That Refuses to Look
The old firewall was defended in the language of compassion, but it was compassion that refused to look. It measured success by how quickly a child left federal custody, not by what happened afterward. A child welfare system that will not verify the welfare of children is not a welfare system at all. It is a conveyor belt with a mission statement.
There is also a harder truth for the families in the Reuters piece. The adults profiled made choices, including paying to have small children carried across one of the most dangerous smuggling corridors on earth, because the previous system rewarded those choices.
Ending the reward is not cruelty toward those families. It is the only thing that stops the next family from putting the next six-year-old in the hands of a coyote.
Scripture does not treat the defense of children as optional or as a matter of political convenience. “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.”
That deliverance requires actually finding the children, which requires the government agencies responsible for them to talk to one another.
Reuters calls that weaponization. Most Americans will call it the bare minimum. The story here is not that a child welfare agency is finally cooperating with law enforcement. The story is that for years it was ordered not to, and hundreds of thousands of children disappeared into the gap.
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.
