(The Center Square)—The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is expanding border wall construction in California after announcing last month construction was beginning in Texas.
Under the Biden administration, record numbers of illegal foreign nationals poured into California and Texas, with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection San Diego Sector becoming an epicenter of illegal entry and crime, The Center Square first reported.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem issued a waiver to enable the immediate construction of approximately 2.5 miles of new border wall barrier in California.
The waiver was issued under Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It addresses environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, “that can stall vital projects for months or even years. This waiver clears the path for the rapid deployment of physical barriers where they are needed most, reinforcing our commitment to national security and the rule of law,” DHS said.
It includes projects previously identified in the CBP San Diego Sector and already funded through CBP fiscal 2020 and 2021 appropriations.
They include the San Diego Sector’s two-mile Jacumba Gap Wall Project; its 350-feet Smugglers Gulch Wall Project; and its 1,500-feet 4 Wall Project.
“Together, these projects will close critical gaps in the border barrier and enhance border security operations in the San Diego Sector,” DHS said.
Border wall construction and repairs in California also occurred under the Biden administration despite former President Joe Biden pledging in January 2021 to not build “another foot” of the border wall.
On his first day in office, Biden halted all border wall construction along the southwest border. Doing so cost taxpayers $6 million a day, and then $3 million a day, to not build the wall due to contractual obligations with the construction firm tasked with building it, The Center Square reported. Materials that had been purchased to build the wall were left to rust on the ground.
Biden also returned $2.2 billion in border wall funds to the Department of Defense, which was reallocated to fund 66 border security projects in 16 countries, three U.S. territories, and 11 states, The Center Square reported.
In 2023, CBP replaced a deteriorated border barrier at the Friendship Circle Project, including a “dilapidated primary and secondary border barrier along the border in San Diego.” The border barrier was a 30-foot double wall, which the Biden administration paused working on in 2022 “to conduct additional stakeholder outreach” and “engage with the community,” The Center Square reported.
CBP also identified 20 miles of border wall to build in Starr County, Texas, saying, “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” The Center Square reported.
Reversing Biden administration policies, rebuilding and expanding border wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border is a major part of President Donald Trump’s border security platform.
Within less than two months of being in office, the Trump administration awarded its first contract to construct new border wall and barriers in Hidalgo County, Texas, in the CBP Rio Grande Valley Sector, The Center Square reported.
The construction will occur in an area to close “critical openings in the border wall that were left incomplete due to cancelled contracts during the Biden Administration.”
The RGV Sector has historically been an area of heavy foot traffic of illegal border crossings and human and drug smuggling and trafficking. Closing this area of the wall and completing construction will support federal efforts “to impede and deny illegal border crossings and the drug- and human-smuggling activities of cartels,” CBP said.
Under Trump’s first administration, the 450th mile of border wall system, including physical infrastructure, access roads, lights, cameras and sensors, was completed by January 2021.
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.
