As New York City prepares to elect socialist Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor, everyday New Yorkers are finally speaking up about the devastating consequences of the city’s sanctuary policies—and their stories should serve as a warning to every American city flirting with similar disasters.
A powerful new investigative video from The American Border Story reveals what the mainstream media won’t tell you: sanctuary city policies have transformed once-safe neighborhoods into danger zones where Venezuelan gangs patrol the streets with metal pipes, sex trafficking has surged, and parents are too afraid to take their children to public playgrounds.
Even moderate Democrats are sounding the alarm. Renee Collymore, a local organizer and lifelong Democrat, didn’t mince words about her own party’s failures.
“This is the worst city council I have ever seen in my life in New York City,” Collymore declared. She explained that the predominantly progressive, leftist, socialist council has created a one-party system that refuses to listen to traditional Democrats or common-sense concerns about public safety.
According to Collymore, when moderate Democrats like herself raise legitimate concerns about gang activity and community safety, they’re immediately branded as “anti-migrant” and shut down. Meanwhile, the far-left legislators “are acting like the migrants are their children” while ignoring the terrorized residents of neighborhoods like Hall Street.
The statistics are sobering, but the human stories are what really matter. After a migrant shelter opened in Collymore’s community, the neighborhood saw a dramatic rise in sex trafficking, stabbings, and even a triple murder. Venezuelan gangs didn’t just arrive—they took over, patrolling streets and instilling fear in law-abiding residents.
Dino, a pizzeria owner and immigrant himself, explained that while sanctuary policies “could work on paper, in reality, it does not work.” He told Fox News that his employees are now scared to walk home at night, customers are staying away, and gangs are running the streets.
“We need our leaders in New York to stop protecting politics and start protecting people,” Dino said—a sentiment that should resonate with every American tired of politicians prioritizing ideology over safety.
One New Yorker identified the root cause: President Biden’s decision to allow countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and others to essentially exile their prisoners to the United States. Without proper background checks or vetting, these individuals—including gang members who committed heinous crimes in their home countries—found their way to American cities.
Local independent journalist Leeroy Johnson explained the predictable result: “Of course, local gangs are going to recruit them. Of course, the older migrant gangs that came here are going to recruit them because they know nothing’s going to happen to them.”
Johnson described a revolving door justice system where criminals are back on the streets within hours of being arrested, “hurting more people over and over again.”
The infamous Roosevelt Hotel shelter became ground zero for Tren de Aragua gang activity—a Venezuelan criminal organization now designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. While the shelter has since been closed, the damage to the surrounding community remains.
With Mamdani holding a commanding double-digit lead ahead of the November 4th election, New York City appears poised to double down on the very policies that created this crisis. The Democratic Socialist candidate has pledged to resist Trump administration immigration enforcement, vowing to stop “masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors”—even those neighbors who are terrorizing communities.
Nicole Kiprilov, executive director of The American Border Story, summarized the situation perfectly: “What you’re seeing in New York is the direct result of failed border policies. Families are scared, neighborhoods are changing overnight, and city officials are nowhere to be found. This crisis isn’t contained at the border anymore—it’s on America’s doorstep.”
The question for voters across America is simple: Will we learn from New York’s mistakes, or will we allow the same failed policies to destroy our own communities? The choice is ours—but we’re running out of time to make it.
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.