Trump administration 'villainizes' immigrant families with misleading directive on food aid
Source: The Guardian
Thu 20 Mar 2025 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Thu 20 Mar 2025 06.03 EDT
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”.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/trump-food-stamps-snap-school-lunch-immigration
= new reply since forum marked as read
