(DCNF)—A sanctuary city mayor, who once suggested he’d use his police force to stop deportation officers and be willing to go to jail over the matter, is now signaling that he wants to work with federal immigration authorities under certain circumstances.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said the city will cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in cases involving violent criminal migrants and will notify the agency of an impending release if ICE makes a request, according to statements Johnston gave to Fox31. The comments follow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) establishment of a working group tasked with investigating sanctuary jurisdictions.
“The whole state is bound by our state law in this, which is pretty consistent in some of these practices like everywhere in the state, we don’t honor ICE detainers,” Johnston said to FOX31. “If ICE calls and says, ‘Will you hold someone for three more days?’ That doesn’t happen in Douglas County or Yuma or in Denver.”
“A lot of these practices are similar statewide, but we think ours finds a common-sense balance of making sure we’re not having our local police doing federal law enforcement, that’s not our job, we’re not going to do ICE’s job for them,” he continued. “But, if they call for information on folks we have in custody, we’ll let them know when we’re releasing them.”
The comments appeared to come in sharp contrast to his rhetoric immediately following President Donald Trump’s election victory, an outcome which brought the prospect of large-scale deportation operations much closer to reality.
Johnston in November suggested he would deploy the Denver Police Department to the county lines to stop federal immigration officials from entering the city’s jurisdiction. While he walked those comments back later that month, he did affirm that he was not afraid of going to jail for standing in the way of border czar Tom Homan’s enforcement agenda.
The Denver metro area has accepted over 42,000 migrants from Central and South America since December 2022, according to the Common Sense Institute. The group 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.
Last year, 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.
Homan previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, while local authorities have the right to step aside and not assist ICE agents, they cannot blatantly obstruct the agency from conducting its mission.
“There are federal statutes on the books for knowingly concealing and harboring an illegal alien away from ICE officers,” Homan said to the DCNF. “There are statutes on the books about impeding federal law enforcement officers – they’re all felonies.”
“Now these sanctuary cities cannot assist – ok, that’s fine. They can stand aside, that’s fine, but they cannot cross that line,” Homan continued. “If they cross that line, we’ll be asking the attorney’s office to consider prosecution.”
The Trump administration appears to be ratcheting up its fight with jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate. The DOJ has just established the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group, which is tasked with identifying state and local laws or policies that are “inconsistent” with federal immigration initiatives and, when necessary, challenging those laws in court.
U.S. attorney’s offices and litigating components within the DOJ will also be tasked with investigating “misconduct” by any officials that obstruct federal immigration enforcement and will seek prosecution.
The border czar has taken particular interest with Denver and said he has no issue prosecuting Johnston in jail if he crosses the line.
“But, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail,” Homan said to Fox News in November.
A spokesperson for Denver did not immediately 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.
