(DCNF)—Democrat mayors who initially advertised their cities as welcoming sanctuaries for illegal migrants have scrambled to scale back key shelter programs as they grapple with mounting costs and community backlash.
New York City, Chicago and Denver — all self-declared “sanctuary” jurisdictions for foreign nationals living illegally in the U.S. — have moved forward with policy shifts for their migrant shelters in recent months, as their local governments grapple with the financial impact of mass illegal migration. Altogether, their taxpayers have shelled out well over $1 billion to house and feed hundreds of thousands of migrants in the past several years, a review of their spending shows.
“Never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during a September 2023 town hall, bemoaning how the Big Apple was receiving up to “10,00 migrants a month” at the time.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” he continued. “Every community in this city is going to be impacted. We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut – every service in this city is going to be impacted.”
More than 200,000 migrants have overwhelmed New York City since the spring of 2022, according to city officials. The influx of migrants forced Adams to declare 5% budget cuts in September 2023 for government programs and services in order to pay for their housing and other services, and in August he said the city was reaching a “breaking point” from the sheer volume of migrants.
Altogether, the Big Apple spent $1.45 billion on migrants in fiscal year 2023, according to the city. The financial burden finally forced New York City to tighten the grip on shelter stays.
Migrants living in shelters were ordered to leave after 30 days with no ability to reapply, although some exceptions for medical conditions or “extenuating circumstances” were given, per a decree from Adams in March. Migrants under the age of 23 were given 60 days to remain in the shelter system, and exceptions were made for migrant families.
When Texas initiatively began bussing migrants into New York City in early 2022, the mayor appeared unbothered and welcoming when addressing the media.
“This is a right-to-shelter state, and we’re going to continue to do that,” Adams said in August 2022. “New York is a city that has always represented the democratic values, and the values of our city, of showing our compassion, and that’s what we’re doing here today.”
Adams proved to be the first of several big-city mayors to declare a shift in migrant shelter policy.
“It is an unsustainable mission because we don’t have support from Congress,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said during a June press conference when defending his office’s decision to begin kicking migrant out of taxpayer-funded shelters. “Congress, of course, refuses to respond to President Biden’s leadership and they refused to enact real substantive immigration reform policy, because that’s really what we need.”
Chicago welcomed over 43,000 migrants since August 2022 and has so far doled out around $150 million to feed and house them, according to the Chicago Tribune. The financial situation became so dire, the city at one point faced a $538 million budget shortfall, with $200 million of it tied directly to the migration crisis.
In response, the city enacted a new 60-day shelter policy for most adult migrants, forcing many of them to leave elsewhere. Roughly 1,000 migrants had been kicked out of the shelter system by mid-June, according to local reporting.
Chicago leaders also appear poised to keep the migrant shelter situation under control as the city prepares for the Democratic National Convention in August, according to local reports.
A couple months earlier, Johnson had urged President Joe Biden to grant work permits to the roughly half million illegal migrants living in Illinois. The mayor also said at the time that Chicago was capable of welcoming another 400,000 to 700,000 illegal immigrants.
The Denver metro area has accepted more than 42,000 migrants from Central and South America since December 2022, according to the Common Sense Institute. The organization estimates that Denver taxpayers and other local organizations have spent as much as $340 million to feed, clothe, shelter and provide other services to them.
Earlier this year, the Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced sweeping budget cuts in order to allocate enough money for migrant services, with an $8.4 million reduction from the city’s police department and a $2.5 million reduction in funding to the fire department.
In response to tight budget cuts and community backlash, Denver announced the closure of four different migrant shelters, saving the city tens of millions of dollars, according to Axios. The city is now enjoying record-low migrant numbers.
Earlier this year, the mayor issued a how-to guide on how the city could be more welcoming to illegal migrants — individuals the mayor’s office refers to as “newcomers.”
The policy reversals in New York City, Chicago and Denver came despite all three jurisdictions being self-declared “sanctuary” cities, making them welcoming destinations for those living unlawfully in the country. The Center for Immigration Studies — an organization that advocates for tighter immigration levels and tracks sanctuary localities — identifies all three as sanctuary cities for enacting policies that inhibit federal immigration authorities’ ability to apprehend illegal migrants.
“These hypocritical Mayors across the country were all too happy to tout their sanctuary city statuses until Texas bused over 119,000 migrants, collectively, to their self-declared sanctuary cities,” Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“These cities are only dealing with a fraction of what our small border communities deal with on a day-to-day basis,” Mahaleris continued.
Texas, which shares the largest portion of the U.S.-Mexico border by far, has endured an unparalleled impact of the ongoing migration crisis. In response to what he says has been a failure of the Biden administration to address the crisis, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, which involves taking on border enforcement unilaterally, cracking down on illegal immigration within the state and bussing migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities.
Abbott’s office says the bussing to these cities will continue until Biden makes a serious effort to control the southern border.
“The real crisis isn’t in these major cities — it’s on our southern border, where President Biden’s open border policies have allowed record-high levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and weapons to surge into our state and country,” Mahaleris said. “Until President Biden steps up and does his job, Texas will continue busing migrants to sanctuary cities to provide relief to our overrun and overwhelmed border towns.”
Officials for New York City, Chicago and Denver did not respond to a request for comment from 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.
