(The Epoch Times)—The Trump administration is suing an illegal immigrant to collect close to $1 million in fines for remaining in the country after a deportation order was issued against her.
The federal government alleges that Marta Alicia Ramirez Veliz of Chesterfield County, Virginia, failed to leave the United States after an appeals board ruled against her in 2022. The government said that as of April 2025, Veliz owed $941,114 in fines plus interest.
Veliz is being sued under a federal law that has been on the books since 1996 that allows civil penalties for illegal immigrants who deliberately fail to leave the country as ordered. In President Donald Trump’s first term, the federal government began assessing fines under the long-unenforced law but did not file lawsuits to collect them. President Joe Biden’s administration stopped assessing fines altogether.
The Trump administration revived the fine policy after the president issued Executive Order 14159 in January 2025, which authorized immigration officials to reinstitute the practice of assessing financial penalties under the law. In June 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued new regulations making it easier to issue fines.
DHS said that as of June 2025 it had sent more than 9,000 fine notices to illegal immigrants for a total of nearly $3 billion.
The legal complaint filed against Veliz on Jan. 23 in federal district court in Richmond, Virginia, states the government is suing “to collect a civil penalty imposed by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Veliz for willfully failing or refusing to leave the United States pursuant to a final order of removal.”
An immigration judge issued a removal order against Veliz in July 2019, which became final after the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed her appeal in September 2022. The civil penalty for remaining in the United States after a removal order has become final is $998 for each day the person subject to the order remains in the country, according to the complaint.
The Trump administration encourages illegal immigrants to “self-deport,” meaning they voluntarily leave the United States on their own.
DHS said last year that civil fines or penalties for illegal immigrants would be forgiven for those who self-deport through the CPB Home App, which is available for smartphones.
“By self-deporting, illegal aliens take control of their departure and may preserve the opportunity to come back to the U.S. the right and legal way in the future,” the agency said in a statement.
The government served a notice of intention to fine on Veliz in April 2025, but she did not appeal the notice, and a final order imposing the penalty took effect in June 2025, the complaint said.
The complaint does not disclose personally identifying information for Veliz such as nationality, age, or address. Veliz does not appear to have legal representation.
Efforts by The Epoch Times to contact her were unsuccessful.
A group called Public Justice filed a proposed class action lawsuit in November 2025 challenging the imposition of the fines on illegal immigrants who fail to leave the country after being ordered to do so.
In a class action, a plaintiff sues on behalf of a larger group of people who claim to have suffered the same injury at the hands of a defendant. Federal and state rules govern whether a class action gets certified and is allowed to proceed.
The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Massachusetts.
The plaintiffs are “hardworking individuals facing significant personal hardships who, like millions in this country, have been navigating the U.S. immigration system.” ICE has fined them “exorbitantly,” sending notices advising them they owe large fines that run from hundreds of thousands of dollars to approximately $1.8 million, the legal complaint said.
The large fines were imposed without the government considering whether they were appropriate in an individual case, and under regulations that were issued without the legally required public input, the complaint said.
The complaint said the fines will drive the plaintiffs and thousands of other people residing in the United States into “ruinous debt, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The Administrative Procedure Act is a 1946 federal statute that governs administrative law procedures for federal executive departments and independent agencies. The late Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nev.) said the law was “a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated in one way or another by agencies of the federal government.”
On Jan. 26, the Veliz lawsuit was assigned to U.S. District Judge Roderick C. Young.
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.