(Daily Signal)—President Joe Biden tells a lot of tall tales about the border crisis, but his claim that he needs the reckless bipartisan immigration bill being negotiated in the Senate to give him the authority to “shut down the border” and he “would use it the day” he signs the bill into law to end the crisis is one of his tallest tales yet.
In truth, this deal is a political ploy that would support his open-border policy and fund his unlimited illegal immigration plan.
Why is Biden’s claim a tall tale? Because federal immigration law already gives Biden the ability to close the border—and he, his advisers, and his political allies know it.
And anyone who believes that, if this bill passes, Biden will close the border is a modern-day Charlie Brown who actually believed time and again that Lucy wouldn’t snatch the football away when he tried to kick it.
The president’s already existing authority to shut down the border was specifically upheld in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii over the so-called travel ban issued by then-President Donald Trump.
As Biden’s political allies will no doubt remember, since they led the charge against it, Trump “shut down the border” to aliens from certain terrorist and other nations until the Department of Homeland Security could determine whether it was able to accurately verify and investigate the backgrounds of aliens from those countries.
Trump acted under 8 U.S.C. § 1182, which states that when “the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens … .”
Trump also acted pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1185, which provides that the president can set the “rules, regulations, and orders” for entry of aliens into the U.S. “subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe.”
The Supreme Court upheld the travel ban since these existing immigration statutes give “deference to the President” to decide when the entry of aliens should be restricted, and provide him with “‘ample power’ to impose entry restrictions in addition to those” already outlined in federal immigration law.
Moreover, the Supreme Court refused to second-guess Trump’s national-security rationale for issuing the travel ban because such national security determinations made by the commander in chief are entitled to great deference, since courts are not in a position to make such determinations.
In addition to this broad, virtually unlimited authority, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, acting Commissioner Troy Miller, is authorized by 19 U.S.C. § 1318 (b)(2) to “close temporarily” any port of entry into the U.S. “when necessary to respond to a specific threat to human life or national interests.”
The open southern border of the U.S. is clearly a national security problem of the highest order and is obviously a threat to our “national interests.” Millions of illegal aliens are overwhelming communities across the country, and human traffickers, drug smugglers, criminals, and terrorists are freely entering with little to no obstacles in their way.
A coalition of former FBI officials recently issued a warning to Congress about the “imminent danger” we face from this flood of aliens, which those officials say is “one of the most pernicious ever to menace the United States.”
As they point out, “military-aged men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands—not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane, but rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.”
Biden doesn’t need this Senate bill to fix this problem.
What he needs to do is to exercise the will power to actually shut down the border; accept the help of states and cooperate in their efforts, like those of Texas, to install barbed wire fencing and eventually a wall everywhere it is needed; stop his “catch and release” policy; quit unlawfully granting mass parole and work permits to illegal aliens; reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers; and take the many other actions to enforce federal immigration law that have proven effective in the past.
In other words, quit sitting on the sideline telling tall tales and get into the arena, and do the right thing. The country is waiting, but its patience has run out.
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.
Von Spakovsky’s stuff is always cognitively dissonant: he cites the facts and then ends with weird statements or conclusions!?
OBVIOUSLY, open borders is THE PLAN!
OBVIOUSLY, THE PLAN is unlimited illegals with their end goal being 100 million by or before 2030!
OBVIOUS to any who bothered perusing ARPA and TACRE (Dept. of Treasury)!
Disburse ever greater portion of federal revenues to ILLEGALS, thus defunding citizenship and destroying sovereignty!
(Note to Mr. Von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation: please read the CISA Act of 2018 and then get back to us on 2024!
The illegal immigration started under Obama’s regime. Obama has continued the invasion. during his 3rd Term using Biden as his surrogate. Obama is putting into practice his mentor Frank Marshall Davis’ plan to reduce the United States into a one party nation and at the same time bankrupt the Country into a Third World disaster.