(The Epoch Times)—Sheriffs will likely play a key role in helping federal agents secure the border and deport illegal immigrants under President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump made mass deportation of illegal immigrants a key part of his campaign to win a second term as almost 11 million people flooded into the country illegally since 2021.
The president-elect’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, has signaled a new era of federal, state, and local cooperation when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants.
Homan, the former acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), indicated he will first target those who have criminal convictions or are wanted for crimes.
“The nation wants a safe country. We’ve had enough crime in this country,” Homan said during a stop at the Texas border in November.
Sheriffs in the nation’s 3,100 counties could play an essential role in helping ICE to identify and detain illegal immigrants, said Sam Bushman, CEO of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a conservative organization that opposes “unconstitutional” government overreach.
As chief law enforcement officers in their counties, elected sheriffs have more latitude than appointed police chiefs. They have authority over criminal investigations, serving warrants, managing county jails, and providing court security within the county.
Bushman foresees cooperation between willing county, state, and federal authorities to deport illegal immigrants, possibly through the creation of a new coordination agency or command center.
“I think that we could create an organization that communicates with this trifecta, and that would be very effective,” he said.
Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and founder of CSPOA, has been in contact with Homan and believes sheriffs will be an integral part of border security and deportation efforts because of their unique understanding of their jurisdictions.
“Who in this country knows their counties better than the sheriff?” he asked.
Because of their local knowledge, sheriffs are in a unique position to help make deportation safer and easier, Mack told The Epoch Times.
Regardless of politics, sheriffs must protect their constituents from crime and criminals, both tied to illegal immigration in terms of drug and human smuggling along with violent gang activity, he said.
Policy experts have suggested that the federal government could deputize local law enforcement under its 287(g) program to aid ICE because the agency likely doesn’t have the manpower to do so alone.
The 287(g) program currently provides a framework of cooperation wherein local jails work with ICE to identify illegal immigrants as they are booked for a crime. ICE and designated local law enforcement can then hold that inmate for up to an additional 48 hours so that ICE can take custody of the inmate.
Homan has touted the program as a safe deportation pipeline, as ICE officers can pick up deportees within the safety of a jail setting, rather than having to organize an operation out in the community.
ICE has about 20,000 employees, including support personnel. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) has 6,100 deportation officers and more than 750 enforcement removal assistants who are assigned to 24 field offices, according to an agency website.
Former Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol Rodney Scott, who served under both Trump and Biden, said in a previous interview with The Epoch Times that Trump could expand the 287(g) program to help with deportations, as he did during his first term.
Scott was recently nominated by Trump to serve as the incoming Customs and Border Protection commissioner.
He said the 287(g) program also allows the creation of a task force and hybrid model that would enable local and state law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants.
In the blue state of Maryland, Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, a longtime Republican, recalls when the task force model was operational in 2008.
“We had deputies on the street that could work at the direction of ICE and with ICE to take into custody people who had deportation warrants and so forth,” Jenkins told The Epoch Times.
Reinstating the task force model would help expedite the deportation of criminals in the country illegally, he said.
The Trump administration could also send representatives to local sheriff departments to recruit them to join the program, he said.
“ICE can’t do it alone, or certainly not enough,” Jenkins said. “We need to be a force multiplier for them.”
Tying federal grant money to sheriff department cooperation with ICE would likely convince many to come on board, he said.
Even if sheriffs don’t participate in arresting illegal immigrants, they could help in other ways, such as providing transportation and logistical support and workspace for ICE, he said.
Jenkins said Frederick County’s jail-based detainer program has been successful, resulting in the removal of about 2,000 illegal immigrant criminals in the county.
Under the 287(g) program, sheriff’s office employees are trained to file a detainer and prepare the paperwork under the supervision of ICE in an effort to streamline the process, he said.
San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez, who serves in the nation’s fifth most populous county, has vowed to defy a new county policy to limit cooperation with federal deportation efforts.
Earlier this month, San Diego County supervisors voted to ban its sheriff department from working with ICE on the federal agency’s enforcement of civil immigration laws, including those that allow for deportations.
California law generally prohibits cooperation but makes exceptions for those convicted of certain violent crimes.
Martinez, whose office is nonpartisan but considers herself a Democrat, said she wouldn’t honor the new policy and that the county government doesn’t oversee her office.
“Current state law strikes the right balance between limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with immigration authorities, ensuring public safety, and building community trust,” Martinez said.
In the blue state of Michigan, Barry County Sheriff Dar Lief said it is important to remove violent criminals from the streets.
“I’m on board with that,” he told The Epoch Times.
Lief echoed the belief of Trump and his surrogates during the presidential campaign that many of the illegal immigrants coming into the country were from prison systems or asylums.
“Nonetheless, our governor here asked residents to take in illegal immigrants,” he said. “Who are you opening up your house to?”
Lief said he warned the citizens of Barry County against taking in illegal immigrants, which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called “new Americans,” because there was no guarantee they were properly vetted.
Not all blue states or city leaders are against Trump’s deportation plan to remove criminal illegal immigrants.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams met with Homan recently to discuss deporting illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes in the Democrat-run city.
“We will not be a safe haven for those who commit violent acts. We don’t do it for those who are citizens, and we’re not going to do it for those who are undocumented,” Adams said during a press conference.
Adams said law-abiding illegal immigrants are welcome in the city. Still, it was a “terrible mistake” to allow those in the country unlawfully to commit violent crimes repeatedly, especially those associated with gangs.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in November during a press conference that she supports “legal” immigrants, including asylum-seekers, but not criminals here illegally or those committing crimes.
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“Someone breaks the law—I‘ll be the first one to call up ICE and say, ’Get them out of here,’” she said.
Homan said blue city officials don’t have to cooperate, but he has repeatedly warned them not to stand in his way.
Homan recently announced he would begin deportations in Chicago, criticizing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker for resisting the removal of criminal immigrants.
“If he impedes us, if he knowingly harbors and conceals an illegal alien, I will prosecute him,” Homan said of the Chicago mayor.
Texas Model
Homan said during a visit to the Texas border town of Eagle Pass before Thanksgiving that the state’s operation to stop illegal immigration could become a national model.
He praised Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a $10-billion border mission to string razor wire along the border, place buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, help build a border wall, and bus illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities.
The operation consists of Department of Public Safety law enforcement and Texas National Guard members.
The program also focuses on arresting illegal immigrants for trespassing on private ranchland along the border—offering a unique roadmap for how counties could help deport illegal immigrants.
Brent Smith, the county attorney for Kinney County, has plenty of experience dealing with illegal immigrants in his county, which sits along the Texas–Mexico border.
Kinney County has prosecuted the largest number of illegal immigrants for trespass and related misdemeanors under Operation Lone Star.
In 2019 and 2020, the small, rural county dealt with just 254 and 132 misdemeanor cases, respectively, mostly involving U.S. citizens.
The U.S. citizen caseload has remained somewhat constant, but because of illegal immigration, the total number of misdemeanor cases shot up to 6,799 in 2022 and 5,826 in 2023, according to numbers obtained from the county attorney’s office.
Smith told The Epoch Times that trespassing arrests in Kinney County under Operation Lone Star offered valuable lessons on how to run a border security initiative.
At first, funding went to provide law enforcement, but Smith said it became clear that there needed to be more funding for the entire county justice system for prosecutors, public defenders, clerks, and judges to process illegal immigrants charged with trespassing.
“What I foresee is some very strong 287(g) agreements being entered into, and state and local law enforcement actually becoming an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration enforcement,” he said.
He said that after undergoing a DHS training program, local officers are considered immigration officers under the supervision of an ICE agent.
He pointed to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was known for implementing the 287(g) task force successfully to arrest illegal immigrants in Arizona but came under fire during the Obama administration.
Maricopa County’s 287(g) program was canceled in 2011 after a Department of Justice investigation accused the sheriff of racial profiling.
In 2012, the Obama administration discontinued the task force and hybrid models of the program altogether.
Trump expanded the program in his first term to 150 agreements with local law enforcement and broadened the removal criteria to include misdemeanors.
Under the Biden administration, new 287(g) agreements were paused.
Smith said that once Trump ends the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy, there will be more “gotaways,” which will require a shift in resources to focus on apprehension instead of processing those claiming asylum.
Money—or the lack of it—will be an essential tool in deportation and border security, he said.
On the state level, he has been discussing a bill with Texas lawmakers that would require sheriffs to apply for 287(g) agreements before receiving state grant funding.
The same principle could be applied to federal grant money for cities such as Chicago, he said.
“How much is your political leanings worth to you? Is it worth $1,000, or $100,000, or $2 million?” he said. “We’re going to find out.”
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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.
