(The Epoch Times)—Roughly 1 million illegal immigrants have left the United States since January, the month President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
The findings come as the Trump administration intensifies its efforts to ramp up deportations, targeting large cities with so-called “sanctuary” policies and resuming operations at farms, hotels, and other businesses.
CIS, a nonprofit research group that analyzes U.S. immigration policies, said in a June 19 report that the estimated decline appears tied to the Trump administration’s early immigration enforcement push.
“The number of illegal immigrants has fallen by 1 million since the start of the year, perhaps due to their leaving in response to President Trump’s election and stepped-up enforcement efforts,” CIS wrote. “The decline was caused by a falloff in the number of noncitizens from Latin America who arrived in 1980 or later, a population that overlaps significantly with illegal immigrants.”
To arrive at its estimate, CIS analyzed monthly household survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey (CPS), focusing on a subset of respondents—noncitizens from Latin America who entered the United States after 1980. This group, CIS noted, is commonly used by federal agencies and researchers as a proxy for estimating the illegal immigrant population. By subtracting estimates of legally present individuals from this total, the group calculated a net decline of 957,000 between January and May.
“Our preliminary estimate is that there are 14.8 million illegal immigrants in the country in May 2025, 1 million fewer than we estimated in January of this year,” the CIS report stated.
Still, CIS emphasized that its findings are preliminary and should be interpreted with caution. While the drop in noncitizens is statistically significant, the decline in the broader foreign-born population is not.
The group also acknowledged that heightened enforcement may have made some immigrants—especially those here illegally—less likely to participate in government surveys or to identify themselves accurately. Moreover, some of the administrative data needed to refine the May estimate has yet to be released.
And while CIS concluded that the data “strongly suggest” that Trump’s enforcement stance played a key role in the drop, it acknowledged it cannot definitively prove causation.
Meanwhile, estimates of the total illegal immigrant population vary widely—from about 11 million to more than 30 million—depending on the source and methodology. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated that 11 million illegal immigrants were in the country as of January 2022. President Trump has said that the true figure could be as high as 21 million, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the number could be up to 30 million.
The CIS report comes just days after Trump directed his administration to mobilize “every resource” behind what he called “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” prioritizing sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago that have local policies inconsistent with federal immigration enforcement.
“Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the Remigration of Aliens to the places from where they came,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, adding that ICE, Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and other agencies had his “unwavering support” to “get the job done.”
Illegal border crossings have plummeted since Trump returned to office, but he has expressed frustration with what he views as the slow pace of removals. Amid the president’s latest deportation push, DHS confirmed it would continue conducting enforcement operations at farms, hotels, and other worksites—particularly those suspected of harboring criminal illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, May marked a significant milestone: For the first time since recordkeeping began, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported zero illegal immigrants released into the United States. In a June 17 statement, the agency called the development a “staggering drop” from the more than 62,000 illegal immigrants released in May 2024.
CBP also said agents encountered just 8,725 illegal immigrants crossing the southwest border between ports of entry last month—a 93 percent decline from May 2024, when agents recorded 117,905 encounters.
“Encounter numbers continue to hold at historic lows, reflecting a border that is more secure, more controlled, and hitting unprecedented levels of operational success,” CBP said.
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.