(The Epoch Times)—Newark, New Jersey, has issued a curfew near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that experienced fiery protests on May 30.
“Due to the escalating situation at Delaney Hall and the increasing need for police intervention, immediate action is required to protect public safety,” Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka wrote in a statement on May 31.
The curfew will be in effect near Delaney Hall every night from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. until further notice, city officials said on May 31.
“Individuals found in violation of this curfew will be subject to enforcement actions,” Baraka added. “A warning to leave the area will be issued initially. However, any continued non-compliance will result in removal from the area and the issuance of appropriate summonses and/or further legal action.”
Anti-ICE protests have intensified outside of the facility in recent days, and law enforcement has discovered that some of the protesters brought their own weapons.
New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said on May 31 that state police, who took control of the area on May 29, have secured a “broader area than just outside Delaney Hall” for safety reasons.
“We will ensure anyone who attempts to obstruct or assault our law enforcement officers is arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote in a statement on X.
The curfew, which will affect Doremus Avenue, closes all pedestrian traffic and limits vehicle access to people with “verified official business” in the area.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill urged that people demonstrate peacefully as she condemned the “aggressive” actions by masked individuals against Newark law enforcement officers and New Jersey State Police at the barrier of Delaney Hall on May 30.
Sherrill said the suspects allegedly threw projectiles, used the barriers of the protest area as weapons, and lit tires on fire in the street.
“These actions put both peaceful protestors and law enforcement in danger,” the Democratic governor wrote in an X post on the morning of May 31.
“The police were not in protective gear; they had been on location since early in the morning ensuring protestors and counter protestors had areas to exercise their rights safely.”
Law enforcement on the scene had to call in backup to protect themselves and the peaceful protesters, she said.
“I do not know why these individuals attacked or what they wanted to accomplish, but I refuse to let these dangerous actions detract from New Jersey’s dedication to ensuring public safety, keeping people safe from ICE, and that the people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill suggested that some of them came from out of state.
“We know that people from outside of the state have been interfering in the protests and escalating them,” Sherrill said at a press conference on May 30. “Five of the six people arrested last night by state police were from outside New Jersey.”
A standoff between Democratic activists and law enforcement started at Delaney Hall over a week ago when detainees, who were illegal immigrants being held inside the facility, wrote an open letter alleging they experienced physical and psychological torture and were denied medical care and food.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denied the allegations on May 25 and accused Democratic politicians of spreading misinformation.
The government agency stated that “detainees receive “[three] meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries” and have access to phones, lawyers, and medical care.
Days later, Democrats doubled down on their allegations of issues inside the immigration detention center.
Eight Democratic members of Congress issued a joint statement on May 29 claiming that “law-abiding immigrants, including mothers and fathers of US citizens, pastors, and pregnant women, [were] being denied health care, food and due process.”
The statement was released by U.S. Reps. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), Nellie Pou (D-N.J.), Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), and Herb Conaway (D-N.J.).
“This is an absolute abomination,” the Democratic lawmakers said. “We are proud to see so many New Jerseyans show up for their neighbors and friends to express their outrage. We will continue to support them as we raise our voices—together.”
They said that they won’t rest until Delaney Hall is closed for good.
Sherrill separately demanded a series of requests to reform the center, and one of them was granted by DHS on May 31.
“Starting today, limited visitation will resume at noon, and regular visitation hours will be restored beginning tomorrow,” Sherrill wrote in an X post on May 31.
The update came one day after Sherrill called on DHS to also provide appropriate medical care for all detainees, give them a meaningful chance to review their cases, and not to pressure them into signing deportation documents.
“I urge everyone who shares these goals to continue working together to lower the temperature and protest peacefully—so we can continue making progress for families and detainees while avoiding any ICE escalation that would only create more fear and uncertainty in our communities,” Sherrill added in her May 31 X post.
President Donald Trump has suggested that the protests outside the immigration facility were organized.
“These aren’t protesters,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on May 27. “These people are fake. They’re all paid for.”
Evgenia Filimianova and Tom Gantert contributed to this report.
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.
