(DCNF)—As deportation officers continue to zero in on Chicago and Republican officials gear up for investigations into the mayor, moderate aldermen are bemoaning city leadership’s reluctance to wind back its strict sanctuary policy.
The Trump administration is executing large-scale immigration enforcement operations across the United States and making Chicago a top target, in large part because of the city’s laws restricting cooperation between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Border czar Tom Homan has argued that localities that work with ICE agents make it easier to focus on criminal migrants, as agents are not forced to make apprehensions throughout the community at large.
Despite pressure from the White House and national surveys indicating the majority of Americans support enforcement of immigration laws, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has defiantly stood by the city’s sanctuary law. Some of the few moderate members of the Chicago City Council have become frustrated over the matter.
“The liberals control everything,” Chicago Alderman Nicholas Sposato said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So if they want to remain a sanctuary city and protect criminals over law-abiding citizens in our community then I guess that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Sposato was one of only 11 aldermen in January who voted in favor of a proposed amendment to the Welcoming City Ordinance (WCO), which prohibits any cooperation between Chicago authorities and ICE agents. The amendment called for cooperation in circumstances when the wanted illegal migrant has been involved in serious criminal activity.
That proposal was smacked down by the city council’s liberal majority in a 39-11 vote. Alderman Raymond Lopez, who proposed the amendment along with another Democrat, ripped the decision to stand by the current policy.
“It shouldn’t take an act of Congress or city council, for that matter, to say we’re not going to protect child sexual predators and human traffickers, but yet, that’s exactly what the City Council did when it rejected the amendment that would allow for our police officers to work with our federal partners when someone is arrested or convicted of four very specific violent and dangerous criminal crime categories,” Lopez said to the DCNF.
Those four categories include illegal migrants arrested or convicted of sexual crimes against minors, gang-related activities, drug-related activities or prostitution-related activities.
“My colleagues have said, ‘if ICE wants them, ICE can go get them in the neighborhoods themselves. We’re not going to help,’” Lopez continued. “Well, who does that really help?”
The Windy City has been hit particularly hard by the border crisis that began under the Biden administration. More than 51,000 migrants have flocked to Chicago since August 2022, requiring housing, food and other accommodations. Local taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
In the days leading up to the amendment vote, Lopez argued that allowing ICE agents to pick up criminal illegal migrants at Chicago jail detention facilities would help otherwise law-abiding illegal migrants in the city, as it kept deportation officers from making arrests out in the community. This is a point Homan has repeatedly made, having previously told the DCNF that he is focusing on the “worst first,” but cautioned that deportation officers won’t hesitate to arrest any other illegal migrant during a raid if they happen to come across one.
Johnson’s office reportedly distributed a memo to members of the City Council ahead of the vote, telling aldermen that the proposal would lead to over-policing of black and brown communities.
President Donald Trump has so far followed through on campaign pledges to executive an ambitious immigration enforcement agenda, having immediately declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and deploying troops to help Border Patrol’s mission in stemming unlawful crossings. The administration has also ramped up ICE enforcement actions incredibly.
ICE daily arrests have repeatedly exceeded 1,000, according to the memos published by the agency. To put this figure into perspective, the daily ICE arrests under the Biden administration averaged to roughly 310 in fiscal year 2024.
As federal immigration authorities carry on with their mission, the administration has taken particular interest in Chicago.
During an ICE raid in Chicago earlier in January, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove was reportedly on the ground and monitoring the action, watching for any possible interference by city officials. Bove’s presence at the raid follows the Justice Department’s creation of a task force dedicated to investigating sanctuary jurisdictions and waging a lawsuit against any locality that is deemed to be in defiance of federal law.
Additionally, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee delivered a letter to Johnson announcing an investigation into his city’s sanctuary policies. The letter — which was also delivered to three other mayors — asked Johnson to hand over pertinent internal documentation and communication and requested he testify before the committee in February.
“Chicago is in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, and we continue to maintain that place with all of the pointless, endless political bluster coming out of the mouths of Brandon Johnson and his hyper liberal, socialist enablers,” Lopez, a Democrat, said to the DCNF.
Lopez, who himself has Mexican roots, said the immigrant community wants to see criminal illegal migrants be removed, arguing that they hurt their community’s image.
“Even undocumented individuals want the criminals deported or expelled, because it taints them as well,” he said. “It stains their existence here by being lumped into one category with those folks.”
“I think that is what helped fuel the anger within the Latino community, specifically the Mexican American voting block, because they saw that as a slap in the face to all of their trials and tribulations, especially those that know or have relatives or friends who are still struggling for a path and were completely forgotten by the Democratic Party in order to make way for the migrant asylum seekers,” he said.
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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.
