Markwayne Mullin was sworn in yesterday as the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mullin, who had represented Oklahoma in the United States Senate, replaces Kristi Noem and takes on a deeply troubled agency.

• dhs has been in partial shutdown for 40 days due to Congress’s refusal to pass a funding bill.
• The impasse has triggered furloughs, delayed paychecks for tens of thousands of employees, and produced extremely long security lines and delays at airports nationwide.

This week, Senate Republicans offered Democrats a new proposal to break the stalemate that would fund most of dhs, including the Transportation Security Administration, while postponing funding for certain Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations for later consideration.

• President Trump has complicated matters by declaring he will not sign any bill to end the shutdown unless Congress first passes the SAVE America Act, a landmark bill that requires stricter voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements. Senate Republicans are urging him to accept a narrower deal separating the issues.

Even if Trump relents, a far greater barrier remains: Democrats continue to refuse full funding for ICE and for Customs and Border Protection without sweeping “reforms.” These include requiring judicial warrants before agents enter private homes, banning masks during operations, mandating body cameras, and imposing other limits on enforcement.

• Many Republicans warn that these changes would cripple the Trump administration’s promised largest deportation operation in U.S. history, the central plank to the 2024 Republican platform.

America’s undocumented population in 2016, according to a 2018 PLOS One paper estimate, was 16 to 29 million, far above the oft-cited 11 million figure. Under Joe Biden, another 5 to 7 million people entered the nation illegally and remained. The Democrats’ proposed restrictions would make large-scale interior enforcement nearly impossible.

This drama reveals a much deeper national crisis, one that Bible prophecy foretold for the modern descendants of ancient Israel, which include the Americans and the British.

Herbert W. Armstrong made this clear decades ago in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Scripture promises blessings for obeying God’s law and warns of curses for disobedience. One prophecy states:

The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand …. And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down … throughout all thy land ….
—Deuteronomy 28:49, 52

That collapse of “high and fenced walls” vividly pictures America’s open borders in recent years. Despite campaign promises, the Trump administration still struggles to “build the wall” and reverse the Biden-era immigration surge.

This is not mere politics. It is the unfolding of biblical curses on a nation that has rejected God. Without repentance toward God, no political deal, no new secretary and no border wall will solve the immigration siege already at our gates.