(Just The News)—Roughly one week after the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals handed Texas a win on its border security law, SB 4, the law is facing a second legal challenge.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a class-action lawsuit on Monday seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block the law from going into effect.
The law, which makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime, is set to go into effect May 15. It gives Texas law enforcement the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port of entry and/or arrest them for unlawful entry, among other provisions.
After the bill was signed into law in 2023, multiple groups sued, arguing the law is unconstitutional. A district court and panel of Fifth Circuit judges agreed.
The full Fifth Circuit disagreed and reversed the lower court’s ruling – but solely on procedural grounds. The court held the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue, enabling a door to remain open challenging the law on its merits. As expected, another lawsuit was filed.
The class action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas Austin Division and names the Texas Department of Public Safety and its director as defendants.
SB 4 “is one of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws ever passed by any state legislature in the country” and will “separate families and directly lead to racial profiling,” the ACLU argues.
It will also “transform our police and judges into immigration agents – threatening neighbors who have families here, who have lived here for years, even those who have legal status,” ACLU of Texas legal director Adriana Piñon said. “Immigration enforcement is exclusively the federal government’s arena, and no state has ever claimed the power Texas threatens to wield here. We are taking this back to court to defend our Texas communities.”
The groups said they “seek to represent thousands of people across the state who may be held liable for violating the reentry provision” of SB 4. They currently represent a lawful permanent resident and visa holder they say would be impacted by the law if it were go to into effect.
“Every court to have reached the merits of laws like S.B. 4 has found them to be unconstitutional,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said. “The en banc Fifth Circuit did not reach the constitutional questions at the heart of this case: whether S.B. 4 violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and unconstitutionally strips the federal government of its exclusive authority over immigration enforcement,” the ACLU added.
The lawsuit was filed as Texas DPS is implementing Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security plan, Operation Lone Star 2.0. Since Abbott launched OLS five years ago, from March 2021 through February 2026, OLS officers have apprehended 538,141 illegal foreign nationals, including those referred to Border Patrol. They’ve also deterred 157,112 illegal entries, according to OLS data obtained by The Center Square.
OLS officers have made 63,659 criminal arrests and 12,392 criminal trespass arrests. These include arrests of U.S. citizens and illegal border crossers.
Human smuggling arrests total 10,552 with 23,717 human smuggling charges reported, according to the data.
Total felony charges were 51,091 with 11,950 federal or other charges, with some arrests involving multiple felony charges, according to the data.
“OLS is more critical now than ever because we face more threats than we’ve ever faced before especially from Special Interest Aliens and suspected terrorists who are still coming across the border,” DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez told The Center Square. DPS troopers are arresting illegal foreign nationals with potential ties to terrorism, including Special Interest Aliens from Afghanistan, Egypt, the Congo, Mali, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and other countries, The Center Square reported.
OLS officers are also targeting South American Theft Groups and criminal actors designated as foreign terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua, among other violent criminals, The Center Square reported.
Abbott maintains the position he held several years ago as to why SB 4 is necessary. Former President Joe Biden’s “deliberate inaction … left Texas to fend for itself.” He also maintains that Article 1 Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution empowers states “to take action to defend themselves and that is exactly what Texas is doing.”
His press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, told The Center Square, “Governor Abbott signed SB 4 into law to protect Texas and America from President Biden’s open border policies, the effects of which did not disappear overnight. Texas will not back down from its constitutional right to self-defense.”
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.
