(The Epoch Times)—The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Thursday that more than $84 billion worth of civil fines have been imposed on illegal immigrants for their refusal to exit the United States.
In total, 103,000 such fines have been issued to illegal immigrants since the beginning of the Trump administration, the DHS said in a July 23 statement.
The fines include a $998 per day charge levied on any illegal immigrant who does not leave the country voluntarily, even after a final order for removal has been issued in their name.
“Under President [Donald] Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, DHS is working faster than ever before to remove criminal illegal aliens from our country,” Lauren Bis, assistant secretary of the DHS’s Office of Public Affairs, said in the statement.
“Our message to illegal aliens is clear: LEAVE NOW. If you don’t, you will face the consequences, including fines, arrest, and deportation. Illegal aliens have a choice: They can use the CBP Home app and receive a free flight home and $2,600, or be fined, arrested, and deported.”
In June last year, the DHS and the Department of Justice announced a new federal rule streamlining the process of issuing fines for illegal immigrants, making it more efficient and easier.
The update removed a provision that provided illegal immigrants a 30-day notice of the intent to fine them before fines are actually imposed. It also authorized DHS immigration officers to send fines to illegal immigrants through regular mail and shortened the process applied when illegal immigrants contest their penalties.
The fining of illegal immigrants has faced legal challenges. In a July 8 statement, the Legal Aid Justice Center announced filing a lawsuit on behalf of an illegal immigrant from Virginia who is facing over $1.8 million in immigration fines.
The individual entered the United States in 2016 with a minor child. In 2017, an order of removal was issued against both individuals. In February, DHS assessed an over $1.8 million fine against the individual. The lawsuit accused the fines of being “grossly disproportionate” to the plaintiff’s economic circumstances.
“A $1.8 million fine is not immigration enforcement. It is government intimidation,” Rohmah Javed, director of the Immigrant Justice Program at the center, said in the statement.
“The federal government is reviving obscure enforcement powers to financially devastate immigrant families and send a chilling message. These fines are designed to create fear, not compliance, and no government agency should have unchecked power to impose this kind of life-destroying punishment.”
In June last year, when the DHS announced the streamlined process for fining illegal immigrants, the then-DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “The law doesn’t enforce itself; there must be consequences for breaking it,” adding that Trump was making the government more effective and efficient at enforcing immigration laws.
The financial penalty on illegal immigrants is one more reason why they must self-deport from the United States before it’s too late, McLaughlin said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced the Illegal Immigration Cost Recovery Act last month that seeks to double the civil financial penalties imposed on illegal immigrants who enter or attempt to enter the United States, the lawmaker’s office said in a June 11 statement.
The higher penalties would also apply to individuals with a final order of removal from the United States who fail or refuse to exit the country.
Employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants for work despite them not being authorized to be employed in the United States will face increased financial penalties as well.
“Decades of open border policies have created an enormous and unfair cost burden on Americans that needs to be offset to make things right; meanwhile, those that entered our country illegally should face consequences for their actions,” Scott said in the statement.
“This commonsense bill enforces the law and ensures illegal aliens can’t keep ripping off our country and undermining the hardworking Americans who pay taxes and follow the rules.”
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.
