(The Center Square)–Instead of ending a program through which federal officials have lost track of hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) who were illegally brought into the country, Congressional Republicans allocated billions of dollars to keep funding it.
According to federal law, the care of UACs falls under the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. For years, under multiple administrations, federal and state investigations have found UACs are being abused through the program, including at ORR-contracted facilities nationwide.
Under the Biden administration, ORR placed UACs with unvetted sponsors, background checks weren’t performed, children were released to alleged gang members, human traffickers, non-family members and sent to non-residential addresses, federal inspector general audits and a Florida grand jury found.
Inspector general reports uncovered that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were “incapable of monitoring” UACs released into the U.S., expressing alarm because “missing children are ‘considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.’” ORR initially lost track of roughly 100,000 children, according to the reports. That number has since increased three-fold; UACs were being exploited in child labor situations, federal investigations found, and still are, most recently in Chicago, The Center Square reported.
Information about sexual abuse and physical neglect were so serious that U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA, filed criminal complaints that led to the Biden administration’s DOJ suing at least one NGO. Months later, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi dropped the charges.
She did so after investigations led by Grassley uncovered that UACs were being released to MS-13 gang members and sponsors who were allegedly putting them into forced labor, forced prostitution and sex-trafficking them.
Texas, California and Florida have historically received the most UACs; the number exponentially increased every year under the Biden administration, The Center Square first reported.
From fiscal years 2019 to 2023, ICE transferred more than 448,000 UACs to ORR. During that time, ICE didn’t issue notices to appear before an immigration judge for 65% of UACs transferred from DHS custody, leaving them in limbo, an inspector general report found, The Center Square reported.
Despite years of federal reports highlighting DHS, ICE, HHS and ORR failures to care for UACs, Congress extended funding for UAC oversight in HR 1, the budget bill referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
HR 1, filed by state Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, allocates more than $3 billion for UAC oversight for fiscal year 2025 through Sept. 30, 2029.
Under Part 2, Use of Funds, Sect. 70115, it appropriates $3 billion to ORR “to house, transport, and supervise unaccompanied alien children” in ORR custody pursuant to section 235 of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.
Sec. 70116 appropriates $20 million to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for CBP officers, including Border Patrol, to examine UACs ages 12 and older for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings.
Sec. 70117 allocates $20 million to HHS to determine if UACs ages 12 or older pose “a danger to self or others” by examining them for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings.
Sec. 70118 allocates $50 million to ORR to screen potential UAC sponsors. It directs the HHS secretary to provide the Homeland Security secretary with information about the sponsor, including “the name of the individual and all adult residents of the individual’s household” and each of their Social Security numbers and birthdays. It also requires the sponsor’s residence to be validated and their immigration status and contact information to be confirmed and shared.
It also requires “the results of all background and criminal records checks for the individual and all adult residents of the individual’s household, which shall include at a minimum an investigation of the public records sex offender registry, a public records background check, and a national criminal history check based on fingerprints” be shared between agencies.
Sec. 70119 appropriates $100 million “to permit a specified unaccompanied alien child to withdraw the child’s application for admission pursuant to section 235(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act” to be repatriated to their country of origin on a case-by-case basis. The section only applies to UACs encountered at ports of entry – not between ports of entry – who immigration officials deem inadmissible.
Repatriation doesn’t apply if officials determine the UACs are victims of severe forms of human trafficking; face being trafficked once returned, or express “a credible fear of persecution” if returned to their country of origin.
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.
