(The Center Square)—A new California bill would prioritize illegal immigrants for taxpayer-funded disaster aid, warned California Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego.
AB 262, authored by Assemblymember Jessica Caloza, D-Los Angeles, would require California to “prioritize local agencies that are not eligible under [federal law] due to their inability to meet the minimum damages threshold” of $1 million to unlock federal disaster funds.
“You are carving out the authority for state funding to go to illegal immigrants,” said DeMaio. “The bill would allow the director of emergency services to prioritize funds for people who not here legally.”
Caloza responded by saying natural disasters impact all people who live in the area.
“Natural disaster does not discriminate whether or not it’s going to impact you and your community depending on your immigration status,” replied Caloza.
The State Assembly Committee on Emergency Management’s bill analysis highlighted its “equity impact” on Latino communities, providing more insight into the bill.
“Latino households and small businesses often lack disaster plans or insurance coverage, leaving them financially unprepared,” said the report, citing UCLA research. “Latinos are disproportionately employed in outdoor jobs such as agriculture, construction, and landscaping, where exposure to wildfire smoke poses significant health risks and often disrupts their ability to work, resulting in lost income.”
“At least 323,000 Angelenos have been affected by the wildfire, and among those, 74,000 were Latinos, or about 1 in 4,” continued the report.
According to the U.S. Census, Los Angeles is half Latino, which means Latinos were proportionately less likely to have been impacted by the recent fires.
The bill would also create and pass the California Individual Assistance Act, which would “provide local agencies, community-based organizations, and individuals” with “housing assistance” and “financial assistance” that includes coverage of “income losses,” “costs to clean, repair, or replace essential personal property items,” and even “medical, dental, and funeral expenses resulting from the local emergency.”
The funding would be given to individuals — defined as “a person residing in California” — and families.
The bill also would also fund “community-based organizations” for costs for personnel, equipment, translation services, supplies and materials for a governor-declared state of emergency. It also would fund “indirect administrative costs,” “reimburse local agencies or community-based organizations that provide individual and family grants,” and “fund necessary and required site preparation costs for evacuation and local assistance centers.”
The bill specifies that funds can go out even if the governor has not declared a state of emergency so long as the a local agency has proclaimed a local emergency and the director of emergency services accepts the proclamation.
It’s unclear what measures would be undertaken to prevent local elected officials from declaring minor local issues as disasters to qualify for more state funding and hand out more financial “assistance” to “residents,” especially with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s history of weakening financial disclosure requirements after natural disasters.
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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.
If you live in California you deserve everything you get from your elected leaders, you voted for them now deal with it!
People trying to fight California’s bill by bill is missing the point.
This is not an illegal immigrant fight, it’s not even a budget fight. This is a dangerous ideology whose objective if taken collectively is called “kill by overdose”.
You can kill a seemingly unkillable nation like USA if:
1. You make it expend so much money that it cannot pay back, it’s money is worthless and it’s system is dependent on debt.
2. You flood it’s is population with unlimited illegals and use illegals to drain the value of the currency, see 1.
3. You destroy internal family formation and regeneration by fermenting factors that depress actual American birth. Destroy family structure or formation, encourage things can depress birth including but not limited to extreme feminism , extreme permiscuity lifestyles especially for females(since females are the actual gatekeepers of the next generation), very high abortion or birth control rate, tell everyone to postpone birth age, encourage lifestyle that removes viable humans from the birth cycle including LGBTQ encouragement and transition(which is also known as chemical castration)
4. You put such a low bar or non-existence enforcement on drug charges, and flood the market with things like fentanyl or even legal drugs. Again depressing birth or family formation is a wonderful effect.
5. You allow all of its competitor nations to drain it of jobs by constructing a global system of one-way tariff, so prices are only cheap in one direction, and prohibitive expensive the other way so there are no jobs for the nation.
6. You flood the country with debt, massively and ideally cheaply, unreasonably cheap, like a decade of zero interest rate, so that its system is addicted. Not so different from a drug dealer’s strategy.
7. You destroy and take control of it’s school system, so the next generation is worthless for this country. Ideally you don’t just teach students nothing because that would be easy to detect, and easy to fix, but instead teach them useless stuff that creates infighting in the country when they grow up. Essentially try to create a negative value that is much harder to fix, and it is Self magnifying (a negative number gets more negative when it’s multiplied by the social effect)
So yes, with that perspective, California’s action is just by design going in this direction, the goal is to bankrupt California and hopefully also bankrupt USA. It’s not accident, it’s by design.