(DCNF)—When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joe Edlow returned for another stint in the Trump administration, he expected to wrangle with a mess left by the Biden administration’s border crisis.
Soon, however, Edlow would be met with a surprise. Not only was USCIS forced to tackle a record-setting pile of asylum cases, but he was tasked with leading an agency that, for 4 years, did very little to address immigration fraud. The director has since buckled down on asylum fraud, identifying discrepancies in immigration programs and tightening election integrity.
“What I didn’t know was what some of our backlogs turned into,” Edlow said to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Nominated by President Donald Trump in March and officially sworn into the position in July, Edlow took the reins of an agency put to the brink amid following 8.5 million migrant encounters along the southern border during the Biden era. Although largely unfazed by what he uncovered, the immigration chief says he was still taken aback by his predecessors’ sheer apathy for weeding out fraud.
Prior to leading the agency, Edlow had served as chief counsel and deputy director of USCIS during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. In July, he returned to a backlog of asylum cases that dwarfed the numbers he previously dealt with.
“We had about 450,000 cases that were pending on the asylum active docket,” Edlow said of the end of Trump’s first term. “When I got back, there were over 1.5 million cases.”
“Does anything surprise on me what they were doing? Yeah, what surprised me is they weren’t doing much,” he continued. “We already knew that there was a misalignment of priorities and resources, but that became painfully obvious that really USCIS was acting as kind of the the arm of the administration to help maneuver the parole programs, to do what they could on credible fear and to ultimately try to address the growing border crisis that the Bidens have created.”
Americans are painfully aware of the illegal immigration crisis that raged during most of President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were the worst and second worst years, respectively, for inadmissible border encounters in history, according to Customs and Border Protection data, leading to an incredible strain of resources at border communities and major U.S. cities. Altogether, the Biden administration oversaw more than eight million migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during its four fiscal years in office.
Record-level immigration into the U.S. inevitably correlated to a monumental uptick in asylum claims, which are largely processed by USCIS.
There were roughly 311,000 pending affirmative asylum claims in January 2018, according to a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report. By the end of fiscal year 2022 — well into Biden’s tenure — this number nearly doubled to 625,000. By 2024, the backlog of affirmative asylum cases surpassed one million for the first time in history.
Affirmative asylum claims are distinct from defensive asylum claims in that they are lodged by foreign nationals already in the U.S. and not in deportation proceedings, according to USCIS. Defensive asylum claims are made by those already undergoing removal.
As illegal immigration skyrocketed, leaving federal immigration agents and local officials scrambling to keep up, the Biden administration implemented a slate of programs that GOP critics characterized as amnesty run-arounds to alleviate the terrible optics taking place at the Mexico border.
The Biden White House launched the CHNV program, allowing more than half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals to enter the U.S. Biden officials also revamped the CBP One app allowing foreign nationals to easily apply for asylum en masse, and extended deportation protections for a slate of countries, allowing their citizens to remain in the U.S.
Government officials that held the line against immigration fraud were largely given the boot, according to their accounts. A slate of Trump-appointed immigration judges were booted by the Biden administration, prompting GOP investigation at the time.
“I was punished by the Biden Administration for calling out fraudulent asylum claims while I was an Immigration Judge,” Matt O’Brien — who served as a judge during both the Trump and Biden administrations — said to the DCNF. O’Brien was fired by the Biden White House after establishing a tough record on asylum applicants.
Of the 288 asylum cases he decided, O’Brien granted asylum for 25, granted eight other types of relief and denied relief for 255, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data. This equated to a denial rate of 88.5%, well above the 57.7% average for all immigration court judges at the time, and a denial rate that earned him the disdain of open-border immigration activists.
“And that happened because open borders radicals love immigration fraud. They have treated it as a feature of the system, not a bug,” O’Brien said. “That’s why we currently have hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who have never experienced persecution getting asylum.”
O’Brien, who now serves as the deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, was among several Trump-appointed immigration judges given the boot during the Biden administration, prompting an investigation by congressional Republicans at the time.
Edlow, not at the helm of the country’s legal immigration system, believes there was a “get-to-yes mentality” among USCIS during the Biden era, paving the way for fraudulent claims to get through.
In contrast, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to shore up its fraud enforcement apparatus.
In just the past few months, USCIS has implanted new measures to better prevent foreign nationals from voting in U.S. elections and has illustrated how Special Immigrant Juvenile program was rife with adult gangbangers, sexual predators and even alleged murders. However, the USCIS chief says they’ve only just begun cracking down.
“We’ve got to return the integrity of the immigration system, and that’s really a job for USCIS,” Edlow said to the DCNF.
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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.