The Trump administration is now leveraging popular anti-hunger initiatives, including food assistance and school lunches, as part of its offensive against immigrants in the US. Many believe this approach will hinder a significant number of families—particularly children—from obtaining the food benefits for which they qualify.
In a recent memo, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins informed senior staff at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS): “It is crucial to utilize all available legal authority to eliminate any incentives within FNS benefit programs that promote illegal immigration.”
In the press release accompanying the memo, Rollins stated, “The era of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize illegal immigration is over.”
Although Rollins’s directive does not alter individuals’ access, researchers, advocates, and service providers suggest it spreads misinformation regarding undocumented immigrants and may induce a chilling effect among immigrant and mixed-status families—a phenomenon seen during the first Trump administration.
“It’s posturing aimed at harming communities,” remarked Juan Carlos Gomez, a senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). Undocumented immigrants have been ineligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—which serves over 42 million individuals—long before Trump’s first term. Even authorized immigrants must wait five years before applying.
“That piece of misinformation from the secretary,” he said, acts like a seed that continues to grow, leading people to believe “undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits they’re not entitled to.”
Other FNS programs, like the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to around 30 million schoolchildren, and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which aids low-income families with free USDA foods dispensed by food banks, do not impose citizenship requirements like SNAP.
“It genuinely feels like immigrant families are being targeted, having food taken from their tables,” said Emily Loveland, a professor at California State University, San Bernardino, who researches social welfare programs like SNAP.
SNAP, offering an average of about $6 per day per person, is already challenging to access and utilize. Complicated eligibility criteria require applicants to provide verification and complete an interview to receive food benefits. Both Democrats and Republicans have previously enacted modifications or cuts to SNAP, and recently, House Republicans have targeted the program in budget reconciliation efforts to fund an extension of the 2017 tax cuts benefiting the wealthy.
“[The directive] is part of a broader narrative to malign those who receive benefits,” said Lily Roberts, managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress. “Ultimately, it’s part of a strategy to eliminate benefits—whether through administrative action, illegal machinations, or congressional reconciliation aimed at reducing SNAP and Medicaid in exchange for tax reductions for the affluent.”
If the Trump administration intends to alter individuals’ access to SNAP, it can only be accomplished through legislative changes, not via executive order or directive. Nevertheless, even the mere perception of policy shifts can generate chilling effects that directly affect the health of immigrant households in the US.
Research indicates that a proposed modification to the public charge rule in 2016—determining if individuals seeking immigration status might become reliant on governmental support—resulted in “significant and large decreases” in participation in food and nutrition assistance programs like SNAP, the School Breakfast Program, and the National School Lunch Program.
“We learned during the first Trump administration that rhetoric significantly influences people’s behavior,” said Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studies safety net programs and immigration policy. “Even households with US citizen children may be less inclined to utilize SNAP because parents fear it could affect their immigration status or lead to deportation.”
One-quarter of all US children have at least one immigrant parent, with around 4.4 million living with an undocumented parent.
Based on Census Bureau data from 2016 to 2019, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute found that participation in SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid declined at twice the rate among noncitizens compared to citizens during the first three years of the Trump administration. During that period, SNAP participation dropped by 37%.
In 2020, controversial revisions to the public charge rule became effective, making it more challenging for immigrants to obtain green cards or temporary visas if they participated in federal means-tested public benefit programs like SNAP. This process engendered confusion and fear, leaving even refugees and US-born children—groups not subject to public charge assessments—without essential food assistance due to worries regarding their own or a family member’s green card eligibility.
(The Trump administration’s public charge rule was subsequently struck down by multiple courts and rescinded by the Biden administration.)
Reflecting on the public charge situation, CLASP’s Gomez and other immigrant advocates anticipate a similar trend of disenrollment from SNAP and other nutrition programs following the agriculture secretary’s memo, released on February 25, along with the administration’s other anti-immigrant policies.
“These executive orders and directives are creating confusion for service providers who are also managing a complex array of eligibility criteria,” he noted. “This confusion will have pervasive effects across all immigrant communities, regarding what individuals are or aren’t eligible for—even though ultimately, an executive order or secretary’s memo does not alter the law.”
East anticipates that the new administration may pursue changes affecting immigration eligibility or immigrants’ access to SNAP regarding work requirements or reintroducing a public charge rule. “What I didn’t foresee was the current budget reconciliation proposals, which would drastically weaken the program overall,” she mentioned. “They’re employing every non-legislative mechanism available to diminish access to SNAP, but the legislative outcome remains unpredictable.”
Loveland speculates that the USDA could attempt to modify requirements for nutrition programs that currently do not mandate proof of citizenship, like school food programs and TEFAP. This could ultimately prevent undocumented individuals from accessing them, forcing reliance on already overwhelmed private charity food programs or resulting in food insecurity. If the National School Lunch Program faces restrictions, undocumented students could be left without free or reduced-price meals.
“While their intentions to restrict these policy requirements are still unclear, I’m concerned that even an announcement regarding targeting these programs could instill fear among immigrant families, similar to the impact seen with SNAP and the public charge rule in 2019,” she said. “They are shifting their focus to an ideological assault on immigrants, which lacks any basis in fact or reality.”
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