(The Center Square)–U.S. attorneys are prosecuting violent MS-13 and Tren de Aragua members, including on terrorism charges, after the Trump administration designated both as foreign terrorist organizations earlier this year.
Both the designation and terrorism convictions are firsts this year.
More than 260 TdA members were federally indicted this year. This month, multiple indictments were unsealed, including charging terrorism against more than 70 TdA members in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York and Texas, The Center Square reported.
U.S. attorneys also secured major wins against MS-13 leaders nationwide after the FTO expanded operations since its founding in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Its members, primarily men from El Salvador and Honduras in the country illegally, engage in “campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally.” They present “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” President Donald Trump said in a June MS-13 FTO order.
MS-13 is most active in California, Maryland, New York, Texas and Virginia, the DOJ says. “To protect MS-13’s power, reputation, and territory, members and associates must use intimidation and violence, including murder and assault with deadly weapons, such as machetes,” the DOJ says. They also rival U.S. gangs and are “required to commit acts of violence to increase their status and rank. One of the principal rules of MS-13 is that its members must attack and kill rivals, known as ‘chavalas,’ whenever possible,” the DOJ says.
In Maryland, six MS-13 members were convicted of racketeering and murder this month; three were sentenced to life in prison. They were convicted of luring a 16-year-old girl to an area near Loch Raven Reservoir in Cockeysville, where they “struck her with a machete and stabbed her multiple times, murdering her,” the DOJ said.
They also lured a female suspected rival gang member cooperating with law enforcement to an area near the CSX Bayview Train Yard in Baltimore, where they stabbed her 143 times, killing her and leaving her body near the train tracks. They also attacked her sister at the train tracks, stabbing her 70 times, and stabbed men several times, who survived. They reported the murders and attacks to MS-13 leadership, the DOJ said.
They “committed brutal violence – including murdering and stabbing young women and girls – to fuel their respective climbs up the MS-13 organization. These acts, often carried out with machetes, spread fear and terror throughout the community,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti, who leads the DOJ’s Criminal Division, said.
In Los Angeles, five MS-13 members were found guilty of murdering six people, either by stabbing them to death with machetes, beating them with baseball bats or shooting them. They also threw their bodies off cliffs in and near the Angels National Forest, The Center Square reported.
In Houston, eight MS-13 members pleaded guilty to a multi-year racketeering conspiracy, multiple murders and witness tampering. As part of their plea agreements, they admitted to being MS-13 members and taking orders from MS-13 leadership to commit “multiple murders, extortion, drug trafficking, robbery, and obstruction of justice” in and around the Houston area from 2017 through 2018, the DOJ said. They were sentenced to between 35 and 50 years in prison.
They used machetes, baseball bats and strangulation to kill their victims, mutilated or dismembered the bodies and took pictures that were sent to high-ranking MS-13 leaders in El Salvador, the DOJ said. The victims were believed to be rival gang members, cooperating with law enforcement, or “working against MS-13’s interests,” the DOJ said.
In New York, Francisco Javier Roman-Bardales, a Salvadoran national and founding member of MS-13’s Ranfla en las Calles leadership structure, was arraigned this fall on terrorism and racketeering charges.
He was a fugitive for three years, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List, wanted for overseeing the “Western Zone” of MS-13 in El Salvador, the DOJ said. Mexican officials arrested him in March and turned him over to officials at a California port of entry, where he was extradited to New York.
He was previously indicted by a grand jury in New York along with 14 other MS-13 leaders for “a litany of violent terrorist activities,” authorities said. They include using Improvised Explosive Devices and grenades, using violence to control territories, manipulating the electoral process in El Salvador, operating military-style training camps for firearms and explosives, among other acts. In the U.S., they engaged in “extreme violence, including countless murders, attempted murders, assaults, and related offenses,” the DOJ said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York has prosecuted hundreds of MS-13 leaders, members and associates for committing more than 80 murders since 2009.
In Nebraska, an alleged member of an MS-13 assassination squad in Honduras is being prosecuted. He was wanted by Honduran authorities for a quadruple homicide after he escaped from prison and illegally entered the U.S. through the southwest border during the Biden administration. A multiagency investigation led to his arrest in Grand Island, Nebraska, this month, The Center Square reported.
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.
Just abort MS13. Do what its’ mommy didn’t do. Late term abort it. Demon-Crats approve.