(Daily Signal)—President Joe Biden’s administration has set another record.
A total of 14,509 illegal aliens were encountered at the southern border Monday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Washington Examiner reported, a record for total daily encounters.
This number surpasses a record that was set just last week at a border that has become pure chaos in recent weeks.
“Migrant encounters at the border just hit the highest single day total ever recorded, & CBP has closed down multiple international railway crossings to redeploy personnel for migrant processing, leading to major disruptions in international commerce,” Fox News border reporter Bill Melugin wrote Tuesday in a post on X.
Here’s what it looks like.
BREAKING: Video from a contact on the ground in Eagle Pass, TX right now shows a mass of thousands of migrants waiting to be processed by Border Patrol after they crossed illegally today. I’ve spent hundreds of days there over the last 2+ years and I’ve never seen it like this. pic.twitter.com/JPNYY7sPxI
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) December 19, 2023
Many Border Patrol agents reportedly are calling it the “worst day they’ve ever seen.”
The pictures and videos are certainly shocking.
The current scene on the Eagle Pass border. I’ve never seen it like this @NewsNation pic.twitter.com/XPU1vpClYj
— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) December 19, 2023
The only response from the Biden administration has been to say that the criticism just isn’t fair.
In response to questions Tuesday about the border, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that she and the president “take offense” to the idea that they aren’t serious about border enforcement.
Karine Jean-Pierre says she is offended when people say Biden isn't taking the border seriously — even as record numbers of illegal immigrants pour across the southern border pic.twitter.com/PNqpTPlfxA
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 19, 2023
It’s the American people who should take offense. The White House should feel nothing but shame over its obvious unwillingness to do what must be done to enforce immigration laws and secure the border. At this point, it seems intentional.
For years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been saying that the border is “secure,” despite record after record numbers of illegal aliens or illegal crossings being broken and broken again.
We are apparently supposed to just take the Biden administration’s word for it and shut up.
The record set Monday is just the latest reminder of the administration’s complete abandonment of duty.
From the moment Biden arrived in office in January 2021, this has been an unacceptable problem. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said they would fix border security by fixing the root cause of illegal immigration, which they insist stems from economic problems in Central and South America.
How is that working out?
Biden, Harris, and Mayorkas haven’t solved anything, and the problem is getting worse here at home. The only thing they seem eager to do is squabble with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, about his attempts to seal the border while attacking the previous administration.
On the campaign trail, Biden routinely slammed then-President Donald Trump for his immigration policies, which led to record lows of illegal border crossings. Biden is still doing so, despite the obvious signs that his administration’s policies have failed the American people.
The failure is so acute that some Democrat governors and mayors increasingly grouse about the mess they‘re being left with.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson laughably blamed the Texas governor for the number of illegal immigrants showing up in his city.
The Democrat mayor of Chicago ran on a platform promising he'd make the city a home for the illegal criminals streaming across our border.
Brandon Johnson suddenly sounds different now that his city is going bankrupt and he's losing black voters. pic.twitter.com/jLOV6VWtLv
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 19, 2023
“The issue is not just how we respond in the city of Chicago, it’s the fact that we have a governor … that is placing families on buses … and then they come to the city of Chicago, where we have homelessness, we have mental health things that have been shut down, you have people seeking employment,” Johnson said.
What Johnson is saying is that blue state policies should be exclusively red state problems.
New York Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, at least acknowledged where this problem is coming from, even if he just wants voters to get off his back. He said at a briefing for reporters that New Yorkers need to go to “our center of government and raise our voices.”
Adams said that the problem with the crisis of illegal immigration that’s hitting the streets of his city doesn’t stem from New York but from “Washington, D.C.”
City Hall NYC
During a briefing, the NYC Mayor Eric Adams calls on New Yorkers to raise their voices at Washington DC to tell DC to help out with the migrant crisis. The mayor also states that people came up to him telling him they didn't know he couldn't stop migrants from… pic.twitter.com/AcuXS5RKAl— Viral News NYC (@ViralNewsNYC) December 19, 2023
The mayor is right that New York doesn’t have the authority to deport illegal immigrants or the ability to solve this crisis, but the Big Apple also doesn’t deserve much sympathy. New York declared itself a “sanctuary city” long ago, and now it’s suffering the additional, well-deserved consequences.
Now that city schools and services are being overrun, New York’s Democrat mayor is being put in an uncomfortable position by angry constituents. And he should be.
Illegal immigrants from all over the world know that if they come to the United States, they may get detained by authorities but they also have an excellent chance to remain in this country regardless.
The Biden administration has made sure of that. U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement not only has been overwhelmed by the impossible task it has been given, its agents also have been maligned by the administration just for doing their jobs.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any kind of crisis on the border will provoke Biden and company into adopting policies that actually slow down illegal immigration. They will continue insisting that their hands are tied unless Congress passes an amnesty bill and that this is not their fault.
We don’t have border enforcement anymore since Biden came in, not really. We have a border mob created by a dereliction of executive duty.
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.
