(Substack)—When the Trump administration kicked off its aggressive recruitment for Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, few could have predicted the response. In just weeks, ICE has fielded 141,000 applications from everyday citizens eager to roll up their sleeves and tackle the border crisis head-on. That’s not just a number—it’s a clear signal that Americans are ready to reclaim control over who enters and stays in their country.
This isn’t some vague jobs fair; it’s a targeted effort to staff up for the real work of enforcement. With 18,000 tentative job offers already extended, the agency is moving fast to build out its ranks.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laid it out plainly in a recent statement: “ICE has received more than 141,000 applications from patriotic Americans who want to defend the homeland by removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the U.S. We have already given more than 18,000 tentative job offers.”
Those words capture the raw motivation driving this influx—folks who see their role not as paperwork pushers, but as frontline defenders against threats that have festered for too long under lax policies.
Noem didn’t stop there. She drove the point home with a direct call to action: “Americans are answering their country’s call to serve and help remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, terrorists, and gang members from our country.”
Think about that for a moment. It’s not rhetoric; it’s a roadmap for restoring order. These aren’t abstract dangers—the streets of sanctuary cities have borne witness to enough tragedies linked to unchecked illegal immigration. From the Tren de Aragua gang’s spread into American neighborhoods to individual cases of sexual assaults by those who slipped through the cracks, the stakes are personal for millions. Noem’s emphasis on targeting “the worst of the worst” reflects a strategy that’s already yielding results, with ICE agents hitting the ground in hotspots like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. In L.A. alone, the agency notched its 5,000th arrest since the administration took office, a milestone that underscores the momentum building.
The incentives are pulling in a diverse crowd, too—retired cops, former military, even teachers and tradespeople looking for a second act. A $50,000 sign-on bonus, full student loan forgiveness, and beefed-up retirement packages make it practical, but the pull seems deeper: a chance to serve at a pivotal time. One applicant, a veteran from Texas, told reporters he’s in it for the mission, not the paycheck.
“I’ve seen what weak borders do overseas; now it’s here,” he said, echoing the sentiment in job forums buzzing online.
The Department of Homeland Security’s push aligns with a fresh infusion of resources, including $75 billion earmarked for ICE in a recent spending bill, aimed at hiring and training up to 10,000 new officers by early next year. That’s the kind of investment that turns talk into action.
Critics in blue strongholds have grumbled about the optics—raids in urban centers, new facilities like the Florida-based “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center designed for high-security holds. But polling shows broad support for cracking down on criminal elements, with majorities across party lines backing military-assisted deportations if needed.
Noem herself confirmed expansions in Chicago, where resources are ramping up to handle the backlog of cases. “We’re not playing games anymore,” she said in an interview, signaling that the administration views this as a non-negotiable priority.
What started as a recruitment drive in late July has snowballed into something bigger—a national awakening to the costs of open borders. Families shattered by gang violence, communities strained by unchecked influxes: these are the stories fueling the applications. As ICE gears up for broader operations, that 141,000 figure isn’t just a win for the agency; it’s proof that when leaders chart a firm course, the people follow. The homeland defense Noem describes is underway, one dedicated hire at a time.
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.