Trump administration ‘villainizes’ immigrant families with misleading directive on food aid

The Trump administration is now using popular anti-hunger programs, including food assistance and school lunch, as part of its attack against immigrants in the US – a move many say will prevent large numbers of families, especially children, from getting the food benefits they’re eligible for.

In a recent memo, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins told senior staff at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS): “It is essential to use all available legal authority to end any incentives in FNS benefit programs that encourage illegal immigration.”

In the accompanying press release, Rollins said, “The days in which taxpayer dollars are used to subsidize illegal immigration are over.”

While Rollins’s directive does not change people’s access, researchers, advocates and service providers say it’s spreading misinformation about undocumented immigrants and could create a chilling effect among immigrant and mixed-status families – a trend seen during the first Trump administration.

“It’s posturing to try to harm communities,” said Juan Carlos Gomez, an immigration and immigrant families senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy (Clasp), of the memo. Undocumented immigrants have been ineligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which is used by more than 42 million people, long before Trump’s first term, and even immigrants who are authorized to be in the US have to wait five years before applying.

“That nugget of misinformation from the secretary”, he said, is like a seed that will continue to grow, so that people start “thinking undocumented immigrants are getting benefits they’re not”.

Other FNS programs, such as the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to around 30 million schoolchildren, or the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which supplements the diets for low-income families with free USDA foods distributed by food banks, don’t have citizenship requirements like Snap.

“It really feels like immigrant families are being targeted to have food taken away from their plates in their households,” said California State University, San Bernadino professor Emily Loveland, who researches social welfare programs like Snap.

Snap, which offers an average of about $6 per day per person, is already difficult to access and use. There are complicated eligibility rules and applicants must submit verification and complete an interview to receive food benefits. Both Democrats and Republicans have made cuts or changes to Snap in the past, and House Republicans have recently targeted the program in its budget reconciliation as a way to pay for an extension of the 2017 tax bill that benefits the very wealthy.

“[The directive] is part of a broader story to villainize people who receive benefits,” said Lily Roberts, the managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress. “It’s ultimately part of a plan to get rid of benefits, whether through administrative action, illegal Doge work or the congressional reconciliation plan to cut Snap and Medicaid as a trade for tax cuts for the wealthy.”

If the Trump administration wants to change people’s access to Snap, it can only be done by changing the law, not by executive order or directive. Still, even the perceived threat of policy change is enough to produce chilling effects that directly impact the health of immigrant households in the US.

Research has shown that in 2016, a proposed change to the public charge rule – which determines if people seeking immigration status would be likely to become dependent on government assistance – led to “significant and large decreases” in immigrant families’ participation in food and nutrition assistance programs such as Snap, the School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program.

“I think we learned in the first Trump administration that rhetoric matters a lot for people’s actual behavior,” said Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studies safety net and social insurance programs and immigration policy. “Even households with US citizen kids in them will be less likely to receive Snap because the parents are afraid it might impact their immigration status or it might lead to a deportation.”

One-quarter of all US children have at least one immigrant parent, and around 4.4 million of them live with an undocumented parent.

Based on Census Bureau data from 2016 through 2019, Migration Policy Institute researchers found that participation in Snap, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (Tanf) and Medicaid declined twice as fast among noncitizens as citizens during the first three years of the first Trump administration. During that time, Snap participation fell by 37%.

In 2020, the controversial public charge revisions went into effect, making it harder for immigrants to obtain green cards or temporary visas if they participated in federal means-tested public benefit programs like Snap. The entire process sowed confusion and fear, so that even refugees and children born in the US – groups who aren’t required to have a public charge assessment – went without needed food assistance because they worried about themselves or a family member being denied a green card.

(The Trump administration’s public charge rule was later struck down by multiple courts and withdrawn by the Biden administration.)

Based on what happened with public charge in the past, Clasp’s Gomez and other immigrant advocates expect to see a similar pattern of disenrollment in Snap and other nutrition programs because of the agriculture secretary’s memo, which was published 25 February, along with other anti-immigrant policies from the administration.

“These executive orders and directives are confusing service providers who already have to deal with this long laundry list of who is eligible for what,” he said. “That’s the effect we’re going to see across all immigrant communities, this confusion of what people are or aren’t eligible for even though at the end of the day, an executive order or a secretary putting out a letter doesn’t change the law.”

East expected the new administration to come after immigration eligibility or immigrants’ access to Snap via changes around work requirements or some kind of public charge rule again. “What I did not expect was the current budget reconciliation proposals, which would really gut the program overall,” she said. “They’re using all the non-legislative tools they can to reduce access to Snap, but what will happen legislatively is very hard to predict.”

Loveland thinks the USDA could try to adjust requirements for nutrition programs that don’t require proof of citizenship, such as school food programs and TEFAP, which could ultimately mean that undocumented people may no longer be able to access them and would have to rely on already strained private charity food programs or risk food insecurity. If the National School Lunch Program was restricted, it could mean undocumented students would go without free or reduced price school meals.

“Though their plans to restrict any policy requirements are currently vague, my concern is that even an announcement of an intent to target these programs could have a chilling effect amongst immigrant families, like what happened with Snap and the 2019 public charge rule,” she said. “They’re pivoting their concerns to an ideological attack on immigrants, which isn’t even based in fact or reality.”