(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump is considering employing a centuries-old law to expedite the deportation of foreign national gangs and cartel members to help secure the U.S. border.
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.”
The Alien Enemies Act is part of the larger Alien and Sedition Acts, which Congress enacted during John Adams’s presidency when the United States was on the brink of war with France. It is a sweeping law that, when invoked, grants the president extraordinary power.
On his first day in office, Trump signed 10 border-related executive actions, including an executive order that states that the president may invoke the Alien Enemies Act to stop “any invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States by a qualifying actor.”
Two conditions must be met to invoke the Act, said Joshua Treviño, chief transformation officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think tank that analyzes policy.
First, there must be a war, invasion, or predatory incursion of U.S. territory. Second, the invasion or hostile act must be committed by a foreign government.
The Alien Enemies Act has only been invoked three times in more than 200 years. It was last used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II to create Japanese internment camps after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The internment camps have since been condemned by civil rights groups.
The act was initially used to stop French people in the United States from agitating for war.
Based on that scenario, Treviño believes terrorist groups acting as foreign powers or operating in association with foreign governments could meet the requirements needed to invoke the law.
“When you look at cartel activity, then we are being invaded,” he said. If an organization can kill Americans on U.S. soil and operate with foreign state support, it’s easy to make the argument that they are invading the country, he said.
He said the cartels and foreign gangs could be seen as quasi-government entities assaulting the country’s sovereignty.
“They actually do have state support. In many cases, they are state agents,” Treviño said. “The intersection of the cartels with the Mexican government is very robust.”
The cartels take in billions of dollars through drug smuggling and human trafficking, have their own armed forces, and control territory within Mexico.
The Alien Enemies Act states that when the president makes a public proclamation to invoke the act, “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”
Trump issued two related executive orders that address the designation of foreign enemies and an invasion. The first order is titled: Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and the second is: Guaranteeing the States Against Invasion.
With both measures in place, Trump can gain extraordinary authority to deal with an invasion or wartime conditions at the border.
“I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil,” Trump said in his inaugural address on Jan. 20.
Under his order, the president has given several federal agencies 14 days to provide recommendations regarding the designation of cartels.
Additionally, within 14 days, the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security are required to take appropriate action, in consultation with the secretary of state, to make operational preparations for implementing decisions made by Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and make preparations to expedite the removal of individuals designated under the order.
The Alien Enemies Act permits the government to detain and expel most citizens of a nation deemed a threat to U.S. security without a hearing, based solely on their country of birth or citizenship.
The order says violence stemming from drug cartels and transnational gangs—such as the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—threatens U.S. security.
It states that in certain portions of Mexico, cartels “function as quasi-governmental entities, controlling nearly all aspects of society.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized Trump’s proposed use of the Alien Enemies Act, calling it a “colonial-era law” that discriminates against immigrants.
“Anti-immigrant extremists have repeatedly used ‘invasion’ rhetoric to divide our communities and advance their anti-immigrant agenda,” the ACLU stated last year. The group said the act could be used “to deport millions” of people without judicial review.
State Level Actions
At the state level, in 2024, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott invoked the invasion clause in the U.S. Constitution.
Abbott said that the federal government was failing in its duty to protect states from an “invasion” under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Likewise, Article I says states have “a sovereign interest” to defend their borders.
Basing his authority on the Constitution, Abbott used his state’s National Guard and law enforcement to curb the flow of millions of illegal immigrants flooding in from Mexico. Texas erected razor wire, installed buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, and arrested illegal immigrants for trespassing on private property.
In an extraordinary move in January 2024, the Texas National Guard seized control of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass on the border with Mexico, and blocked federal Border Patrol agents from entering the park to process illegal immigrants.
The prior month, the park had been overwhelmed with thousands of illegal immigrants waiting to be processed by the Border Patrol.
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.
