(Daily Signal)—Over the past 12 months, illegal aliens have been arrested in connection with the deaths of at least 13 Americans. Seven of those victims were minors.
“The simple fact is that every crime committed by an illegal alien is one committed by an individual who should not have been at large in the country in the first place,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green told The Daily Signal.
“While the Left likes to hide behind flawed studies and incomplete data on illegal alien crime, families across our country are suffering from the tragic realities of President [Joe] Biden and Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’ open borders,” said Green, R-Tenn.
The growing number of American lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants coincides with an increase in the number of criminal illegal immigrants crossing America’s borders annually.
According to Customs and Border Protection, 13,130 criminal noncitizens were encountered between ports of entry since the start of fiscal year 2024 on Oct. 1, setting up fiscal 2024 to outpace last year’s 15,267 such encounters.
“Instead of enforcing the laws they swore to uphold, Biden and Mayorkas have devoted themselves to a policy of mass catch-and-release,” Green said. “This radical agenda may excite their far-left base, but the rest of us are left wondering if one of our loved ones will be the next to fall victim to these violent crimes.”
The following are 13 Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of illegal aliens in the past 12 months.
Jocelyn Nungaray, 12
Franklin Jose Peña Ramos, 26, and Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, have been charged with capital murder in the death of Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. Nungaray’s body was found in a creek on June 17.
In court documents obtained by Fox News, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Michael Abner wrote that “the defendant lured a 12-year-old under a bridge, where he and his co-defendant remained with her for over 2 hours, took her pants off, tied her up, and killed her, then threw her body into the bayou.”
Peña Ramos crossed the border in May; Martinez-Rangel in March. Both men are from Venezuela.
“Let me be very clear,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently said in an appearance on Fox News, “These bastards should be executed, and they should burn in the pits of hell. But we shouldn’t have to be talking about this, because Jocelyn should still be with us. And every day this administration is releasing more and more and more illegal aliens who are going on to kill people day after day after day.”
Gloria Cascio, 53
On April 26, Maine state troopers responded to reports of a car crash on Interstate 95 in Wells, about 30 miles south of Portland.
Driving a Toyota Prius, Oguzhan Cildir—an illegal immigrant who crossed the U.S. border from Mexico in January—hit a minivan and a pickup truck, according to The Maine Wire. The pickup truck, carrying Gloria Cascio and her husband, rolled over a number of times. Cascio was pronounced dead at the scene, and her husband suffered serious injuries.
The Maine Wire reported Thursday: “More than 62 days after the fatal accident, no charges have been filed against Cildir, and a police source tells the Maine Wire that State Police are still waiting for a toxicology report.”
Ruby Garcia, 25
Brandon Ortiz-Vite, an illegal alien from Mexico, is accused of killing a Michigan woman, Ruby Garcia, during a carjacking attempt in March.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Ortiz-Vite was deported to Mexico in the fall of 2020, but returned to the U.S. without permission, according to the local Michigan news outlet MLive.
Garcia was found dead on a road in Grand Rapids on March 22 with a gunshot wound to the head.
Christopher Gadd, 27
Raul Benitez Santana, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, crashed into Washington State Trooper Christopher Gadd’s cruiser at more than 100 mph in March.
Santana, driving an SUV, reportedly swerved and hit the back of Gadd’s parked patrol car on the shoulder of Interstate 5 in Marysville, Washington, about 34 miles north of Seattle.
The New York Post reports that it’s unclear when Santana first arrived in the U.S., but he has had multiple run-ins with U.S. law enforcement dating back to 2013.
Gadd was a husband and father of a daughter.
Travis Wolfe, 12
On Dec. 20, Endrina Bracho crashed her vehicle into a car carrying 12-year-old Travis Wolfe and his parents. The Missouri family was rushed to a hospital, and Travis was put on life-support. He passed away on March 6.
Bracho, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, was reportedly driving 75 mph in the wrong lane when she collided headfirst with the car carrying Travis.
Bracho faces multiple charges, including involuntary manslaughter and operating a vehicle without a valid license.
Alex Wise Jr., 10
Rogelio Ortiz-Olivas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, is accused of hitting and killing Alex Wise Jr. while the young boy walked home from school in Midland County, Texas, in February.
CBS reported that Ortiz-Olivas was previously sent back to Mexico on a voluntary removal, and was then deported five times after that.
He faces charges of hit-and-run and of an accident causing death.
Lizbeth Medina, 16
Rafael Govea Romero was indicted in February on capital murder charges in the death of Lizbeth Medina last December.
Romero, an illegal immigrant, had reportedly been stalking Medina leading up to her killing, according to KTRK-TV.
The teen’s mother, Jacqueline Medina, found her daughter dead in the bathtub of their apartment in Edna, Texas, about 140 southeast of San Antonio.
Jeremy Poou-Caceres, 2
Nilson Granados-Trejo, an illegal alien and Salvadoran national, has been charged with first- and second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 2-year-old Jeremy Poou-Caceres in Maryland in February.
The little boy and his mom were out for a walk when they were caught up in the crossfire of an illegal immigrant who was in a car and firing, reportedly at another group of people.
Laken Riley, 22
Laken Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University, was slain while jogging on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, Ga., on Feb. 22. Authorities concluded that she died of blunt force trauma to the head.
Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who crossed the border in 2022, has been arrested and charged with 10 counts in Riley’s death, including malice murder.
Melissa Powell, 47, and Riordan Powell, 16
An illegal alien who had been deported four times faces charges in connection with the accident that killed mother and son Melissa and Riordan Powell in December 2023 in Colorado. He was reportedly driving under the influence.
Jose Guadalupe Menjivar-Alas, an El Salvadoran, was said to be going about 100 mph when his vehicle struck the vehicle carrying Powell and her son.
Menjivar-Alas faces multiple charges, including vehicular homicide.
Aiden Clark, 11
Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian migrant, illegally crossed the border in 2022, according to the Daily Mail.
On Aug. 22, Joseph was driving with an invalid license in Lawrenceville, Ohio, when he swerved over the centerline and struck a school bus full of children. Aiden Clark, 11, was ejected from the bus and pronounced dead at the scene. About two dozen other children were injured.
Joseph was found guilty May 1 of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide and was sentenced to nine to 13 years in prison, WDTN-TV reported.
Rachel Morin, 37
Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, 23, crossed the U.S. southern border illegally in February 2023, according to Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. Six months later, in August 2023, Hernandez is suspected of attacking, raping, and killing Rachel Morin, a mother of five, while she exercised on the MA & PA Heritage Trail in Bel Air, Maryland, about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.
After a lengthy investigation, authorities arrested Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 14 on charges of rape and murder.
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.
You left out Tiger Gutierrez, 22, Albuquerque killed last week by an illegal who checked ALL the boxes: drunk with open containers, ran red light, speeding, fled scene of accident.