(DCNF)—Migrant shelters along the border and across the country are closing down as illegal immigration continues to plunge under the Trump administration.
American taxpayers have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to various migrant shelter facilities in Texas, California, New York and elsewhere since the border crisis reached its height under the Biden administration. With President Donald Trump prioritizing border enforcement and illegal immigration falling to unprecedented lows, leading to substantially fewer migrants needing care, many of these shelters have no reason to remain open.
“We’ve been preparing for these changes in federal policies and enforcement,” Michael Hopkins,” CEO of Jewish Family Service (JFS) of San Diego, said in a January statement regarding the closing of its migrant shelter. “While there are no longer individuals or families seeking asylum released from short term federal immigration custody to our Shelter Services, we are seeing increased needs for immigration legal assistance and other social service supports to vulnerable San Diegans.”
The JFS-run San Diego Rapid Response Network Migrant Shelter provided services to roughly 250,000 asylum seekers since it opened in 2018, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. This behemoth facility, which was once hailed as a national model for other migrant shelters, received incredible backing from the federal government, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarding JFS $22 million in fiscal year 2024 alone.
However, the shelter’s operators say circumstances changed rapidly upon Trump’s return to office. Hopkins revealed that since Trump was inaugurated and immediately shut down the CBP One app for asylum applicants, the shelter has received a grand total of zero new migrants.
The San Diego Rapid Response Network Migrant Shelter is far from the only facility experiencing this trend.
The San Antonio Migrant Resource Center (MRC), in partnership with Catholic Charities, opened in July 2022 and provided shelter for illegal migrants arriving by bus and plane by the hundreds every single day, according to a press release by the City of San Antonio. Since January 2021, the city has served more than 640,00 migrants traveling through to other destinations — costing the city roughly $35 million to operate the MRC.
As fewer and fewer migrants arrive in San Antonio, with arrivals declining by 72% from January 2024 to 2025, city leadership says there’s no reason to keep the shelter open any longer.
“The number of migrants currently arriving at the MRC no longer justifies the cost of running it,” City Manager Erik Walsh said in a statement earlier in February. “At the time, hundreds of migrants were arriving at the San Antonio International Airport and the downtown Greyhound Bus Station daily, with most having no travel arrangements to get to their destinations. That is no longer the case.”
More than 1,000 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, a city once at the epicenter of the national illegal immigration crisis is now closing down its migrant shelters as fewer illegal migrants arrive.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday the impending closure of six emergency shelters for asylum seekers, bringing the total number of migrant shelter closures in NYC from June 2024 to June 2025 to 52. Adams’ office in January confirmed that the number of people in city-run shelters have declined for 27 consecutive weeks.
The immense drop in migrant numbers marks a welcome change for the country’s biggest sanctuary city. Adams said Thursday that more than 230,000 migrants have flocked to the Big Apple since the spring of 2022, costing taxpayers roughly $7 billion and once forcing the mayor to announce major budget cuts in order to shoulder the massive number of illegal migrants.
The shelter closures coincide with incredible drops in migrant encounters along the southern border.
“In the last 24 hours the US Border Patrol has encountered a total of 229 aliens across the entire southwest border,” border czar Tom Homan posted Monday on X. “That is down from a high of over 11,000 a day under Biden. I started as a Border Patrol Agent in 1984 and I don’t remember the numbers ever being that low.”
Since Trump re-entered office, Customs and Border Protection and other government officials have confirmed substantial drops in illegal immigration activity. Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Chris Olivarez confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that illegal border crossings along the Texas-Mexico border fell by 85% in January, citing a combination of successful policies by Gov. Greg Abbott and the new Trump administration.
Since resuming the Oval Office, Trump has issued an exhaustive list of executive orders aimed at controlling the border and removing incentives for would-be illegal migrants, such as declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and attempting to end birthright citizenship. His administration has also published a number of internal directives to better equip federal immigration authorities, such as removing barriers for enforcement actions and deputizing agents across many other federal agencies with immigration authorities.
Fear of U.S. tariffs prompted the Mexican government to deploy 10,000 soldiers to the U.S.-Mexico border to help stop the flow of illegal immigration and end the importation of fentanyl, securing an international boundary already bolstered by American troops deployed by the Trump administration. Upon news of Trump’s re-election, many illegal migrants have chosen to turn around, feeling there was no use of even attempting to enter unlawfully any longer.
“President Trump promised a secure border and he is delivering,” Homan said.
The Jewish Family Service and the City of San Antonio did not immediately respond to requests 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.
