(The Daily Signal)—As President Donald Trump and Congress look to hold illegal immigrant truckers accountable, a future United States Supreme Court decision could modify a federal law that could allow victims of commercial vehicle crashes to hold those responsible for hiring the driver behind the crash accountable.
The ruling, which is expected before June, could overturn a 2019 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and allow for the modification of Section 14501(c)(1) of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994.
“The statute being argued is severely outdated and does nothing to help the innocent families of the victims to unprovoked accidents,” Marcus Coleman, the father of Dalilah Coleman, who was struck by an illegal immigrant truck driver when she was 5, told The Daily Signal.
“If you are a broker and hire a company with issues, and continue operating with that company, you should be held liable. That is gross negligence.”
While the Colemans did not bring this lawsuit, the Coleman family has been pushing for a ban on illegal immigrants obtaining commercial driver’s licenses and has been closely monitoring the case.
The plaintiff, Shawn Montgomery, filed the case after Yosniel Varela-Mojena, a commercial truck driver for Caribe Transport II LLC, crashed into him in 2017. Varela-Mojena’s tractor-trailer veered off the road and crashed into Montgomery’s tractor-trailer, which was stopped on the side of an Illinois highway. Montgomery suffered major injuries, which resulted in the loss of one of his limbs.
Coleman told The Daily Signal that if the court were to side with Montgomery, it could allow the victims and families of these major crashes to sue the brokers responsible for hiring the driver who caused the crash.
Dalilah, now 7 years old, was hit by an 18-wheeler with an illegal immigrant driver behind the wheel in California.
The potential modification of the federal statute could also open the door for lawmakers to insert new guidelines for the employers of commercial truck drivers, also known as brokers, who Montgomery claims are currently shielded from liability over major crashes by hiring third-party driving companies that employ unqualified drivers.
During the oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh told the defendants that “if you’re hiring drivers who can’t read the signs, that seems like a safety issue.”
Kavanaugh added that current federal law has allowed brokers to hire these drivers because of “federal government standards,” since “the federal government regulates the trucking companies and kind of certifies them.”
The Supreme Court could now “force the broker to be liable for the crash instead of hiding behind immunity and moving down the line,” Coleman said.
Gordon MaGill, a 28-year veteran and third-generation commercial truck driver, told The Daily Signal that the reason Montgomery is going after the brokers of commercial truck driving is because they “normally hire fraudulent foreign-based third-party companies,” which are known in the industry as “chameleon carriers.”
The “fraudulent companies,” he claims, are usually outside of American jurisdiction and hire illegal immigrants who settle for a lower wage. “These companies also do not vet their drivers, and most of them can’t even speak or read English road signs.”
The case of non-English proficient and unqualified drivers has now attracted the attention of all of the branches of the federal government.
During his State of the Union address, Trump said that “many, if not most, illegal aliens do not speak English and cannot read even the most basic road signs as to direction, speed, danger, or location.”
The president then called on Congress to pass legislation that would hold illegal immigrant truck drivers and their employers accountable.
Last week, Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., introduced this legislation in honor of Dalilah.
“The Dalilah Law ensures commercial driver’s licenses are limited to individuals who are lawfully present in the United States and able to meet the safety standards required to operate these massive vehicles,” Houchin previously told The Daily Signal.
“When President Trump recognized Dalilah at the State of the Union, I felt like our country was finally listening. I am so grateful to Congresswoman Houchin and Senator Banks for fighting to make sure this never happens to another family,” Coleman added. “This law will save lives, and that means everything to us.”
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.