(Just The News)—The far west Texas U.S. Customs and Border Protection sector of Big Bend made history under the Biden and Trump administrations – for different reasons.
The sector this week unveiled a first-of-its-kind advanced vehicle barrier system, the GRAB 350, at the Sierra Blanca immigration checkpoint. The checkpoint is located at a critical enforcement location along Interstate 10 in Hudspeth County roughly 90 miles east of El Paso.
It is the first of its kind to be deployed at any of the 45 permanent Border Patrol checkpoints nationwide, CBP says.
The GRAB 350 is a new semi-autonomous vehicle barrier system that combines an energy absorbing ground-retractable barrier with an in-ground tire-shredding system designed to stop extremely large high-speed vehicles.
“Interstate 10 is a major artery connecting communities across the country. When someone attempts to bypass an immigration checkpoint, they are putting innocent motorists and our agents at serious risk,” Big Bend Sector Chief Patrol Agent Lloyd Easterling said. “This system allows us to stop and contain those threats in a controlled environment, before they become dangerous pursuits on public roadways.”
“From a public safety perspective, the technology is designed to reduce the likelihood of high-speed chases, collisions, injuries and loss of life. From an agent safety standpoint, it increases distance and control during enforcement actions and minimizes the need for close-contact vehicle interventions,” CBP said in a statement.
The Sierra Blanca checkpoint is one of four permanent checkpoints in the Big Bend Sector where thousands of vehicles are processed daily in a mountain pass bordering Mexico. Agents there play “a vital role in detecting illegal activity and preventing illegal aliens and narcotics from reaching major population centers,” CBP says.
The new technology represents a marked reversal from the previous administration, which strained resources in one of the most remote regions of the country.
The sector covers the largest geographical area of any sector along the southwest border, representing nearly one-quarter of it It includes 77 Texas counties and the entire state of Oklahoma (78 counties), covering 165,154 square miles. Border Patrol agents also patrol 517 miles along the Rio Grande River.
The sector has historically had the fewest number of agents who haven’t had the necessary equipment and technology to patrol the terrain. They are responsible for patrolling an area including a northward route from northern Chihuahua and Coahuila, Mexico, with a port of entry at Presidio. The region includes rocky ravines, canyons and desert with extreme temperature changes. It includes Big Bend National Park, state parks and wildlife refuges.
Because of the type of terrain, building a border wall is impossible and nearly all illegal border crossers are single military age men who are physically able to climb through canyons and trek through the desert, authorities have told The Center Square.
Despite the difficulty of the terrain, under the Biden administration, at the height of the border crisis, Big Bend Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended a record nearly 12,000 illegal border crossers in 2023. They also reported more than 9,100 who evaded capture, referred to as gotaways, The Center Square exclusively reported.
Big Bend Sector Border Patrol agents had never seen these numbers in Border Patrol history.
Fast forward to the Trump administration and the sector received a surge of resources and an historic drop in illegal border crossings.
In fiscal 2025, Big Bend Sector Border Patrol agents reported slightly more than 3,000 illegal border crossers, according to CBP data excluding gotaways.
This was due to “decisive border security policies and enhanced detection and identification capabilities,” expanded Title 8 enforcement, ending catch and release, and deploying 55 autonomous surveillance towers and other detection technologies, Easterling said. “The decrease in illegal entries is a testament to strong border policy, as well as the tireless efforts of our agents, support personnel, and partners like the Department of War and Texas Military Department,” he said. “The men and women of Big Bend Sector have shown resolve, expertise and heart. They conduct their border security mission with great skill while operating in some of the most rugged terrain in the country.”
By last July, the sector launched a new aerostat near Sanderson, providing 24-hour surveillance capabilities. Under the Biden administration, funding for aerostats was cut. Border Patrol agents rely on the large balloons, referred to as “eyes in the sky,” to detect human traffickers, illegal border crossers and others lost in remote areas. The balloons’ radar is capable of detecting aircraft up to 200 miles away, CBP says.
Under the Trump administration, the Big Bend Sector also celebrated another first. For the first time in Border Patrol’s 100-year history, a new horse was born into its horse patrol detachment last year. Sierra Blanca Independent School District students named her Dolly.
Comments About This Story Through X:
We are switching to using X as our comment “system.” Our hope is that by using that public forum, more of our readers will be willing to share their thoughts.
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.
