Last updated on May 15, 2026
USDA’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act guidance on immigrant SNAP eligibility at issue
A coalition of more than 20 states led by Oregon and New York sued the Trump administration in federal court on Nov. 26, seeking to block a new U.S. Department of Agriculture policy that limits which immigrants can receive food stamps under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.
“It’s wild that we’re here the day before Thanksgiving,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said. “We’re the wealthiest country in the world, and no one should go hungry. When this memo came out, we thought it must be a mistake. The law is clear, and this is not how you treat people.”
Filed in the U.S. District Court in Eugene, Ore., New York et al. v. Rollins challenges an Oct. 31 memorandum from USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service that rewrites how noncitizens qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP provides monthly benefits to help low-income households buy groceries and reached more than 40 million people in 2024, according to federal and nonprofit analyses.
The Oct. 31 guidance interprets Section 10108 of the OBBBA, a budget reconciliation law that amended the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 and tightened work rules, benefit calculations, and immigration provisions for SNAP. A May 30 Congressional Research Service report, drawing on preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates, suggested that the budget reconciliation law’s Nutrition subtitle, including 12 separate SNAP provisions, would reduce federal spending on nutrition programs by about $295 billion over 10 years. The vast majority of that savings comes from SNAP.
The new lawsuit asks the court to declare the Oct. 31 guidance unlawful, vacate it, and enjoin USDA from enforcing it against state agencies that run the food assistance program. The coalition’s complaint brings claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, alleging that USDA’s interpretation of the Food and Nutrition Act is contrary to applicable law, “arbitrary and capricious,” and adopted without the procedures required for a substantive change in eligibility rules.
At the center of the dispute is USDA’s new chart of “alien eligibility” categories, which the plaintiff states say misclassifies who remains eligible and who does not. The memo instructs state food aid agencies that, after OBBBA, “some alien groups previously eligible for SNAP are no longer eligible” and that those noncitizens “must be removed from the household” at recertification if all other eligibility requirements are met. An attached table lists three main groups who may receive SNAP as soon as they meet the financial rules: noncitizen U.S. nationals, certain Cuban and Haitian entrants, and citizens of three Pacific island nations that have Compacts of Free Association with the United States.
Lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, can still qualify, but in most cases only after a five year waiting period unless they are under 18, have a qualifying work history, or live with a disability. The plaintiff states do not contest that Congress in OBBBA eliminated some stand alone SNAP categories for people still in refugee or humanitarian parole status. Their core claim is that USDA went much further than Congress by effectively treating many refugees, asylees, and parolees who later became lawful permanent residents as permanently ineligible.
In a Nov. 19 letter to Rollins, New York Attorney General Letitia James and 20 other attorneys general warned that the guidance “will create confusion and inconsistency among State agencies and potentially deprive thousands of LPRs of food assistance to which they are entitled under the law.” They argued that nothing in OBBBA “prohibits individuals who once held the status of Refugees, Individuals Granted Asylum, or Parolees from gaining eligibility for SNAP if and when they adjust their status to LPRs.” The letter points out that the guidance dictates that each immigration status “stands alone” and that when one status expires, agencies must check whether the person qualifies under another status. Yet the new chart labels refugees, asylees, and parolees simply “Not eligible,” without the clarifying phrase “Not eligible unless an LPR” that appears for some other groups.
Before OBBBA, federal law treated refugees, many people granted asylum, and some other humanitarian categories as eligible for SNAP while those persons held that status and after they adjusted to lawful permanent residence, subject to detailed rules in the Food and Nutrition Act. The states argue that Congress did not clearly revoke that pathway, and that USDA’s reading of Section 10108 is arbitrary under the Administrative Procedure Act.
The immigrant-eligibility fight comes only weeks after a separate confrontation over whether any SNAP benefits would be paid during the fall 2025 government shutdown. On Oct. 28, Massachusetts and 24 other states sued USDA and the Office of Management and Budget in Boston, after the department announced it would suspend November SNAP benefits, despite the availability of contingency funds that had been used in past shutdowns. In Commonwealth of Massachusetts et al. v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani held that USDA’s refusal to use its multi year contingency fund rested on an erroneous reading of the governing statutes.
The same day, Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. granted a temporary restraining order in Rhode Island State Council of Churches et al. v. Rollins, directing USDA to use the contingency fund to pay at least partial SNAP benefits for November and setting deadlines for the agency to act. In a Nov. 3 compliance report, USDA told the Rhode Island court that it would use the SNAP contingency fund for reduced benefits but had “determined not to use Section 32 Child Nutrition Program funds or other funds to provide full SNAP payments for the month of November.”
As the shutdown dragged on, USDA sent conflicting messages about November benefits. In late October and early November, after federal courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ordered the agency to use its contingency fund, USDA first told states it could only make partial payments and then said it was “working towards implementing November 2025 full benefit issuances” using contingency and Section 32 funds. At the same time, the department’s own status reports warned that partial payments would require “massive” and “novel system changes” that could delay benefits by weeks or months and would not actually exhaust the contingency fund.
In a Nov. 6 order responding to a request to enforce his earlier TRO, Judge McConnell noted that “42 million individuals, approximately 1 in 8 Americans, rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” including millions of children, elderly people and veterans, and wrote that USDA’s actions during the shutdown were “more than poor judgment; it is arbitrary and capricious,” warning that agency discretion “becomes obstruction cloaked in administrative formality” when it defeats the program’s purpose. Judge McConnell rejected USDA’s assertion that there was “nothing more” the agency could do, emphasizing that “compliance is achieved when Americans are fed, not when the federal government shifts the administrative burden of disbursing funds onto the States.”
Two days after the Rhode Island federal court’s order, on the night of Saturday, Nov. 8, USDA issued yet another memo declaring that full November payment files “were unauthorized” and directing state agencies to “immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” warning that failure to comply could lead to cancellation of federal reimbursement for administrative costs and liability for overissuances, despite its earlier written assurances that full benefit issuances were in progress.
On Nov. 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to stay Judge McConnell’s order, describing SNAP as “a vital bulwark against hunger and food insecurity,” serving “forty-two million people, one out of every eight Americans,” including “fourteen million children and eight million elderly individuals,” and concluding that the government had not made the “strong showing” of likely success on the merits required for an emergency stay.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose state is part of the coalition that sued on Wednesday, has explicitly linked that shutdown episode to the immigrant-eligibility lawsuit. In a Nov. 26 statement announcing California’s participation, he said SNAP recipients “are still recovering from the whiplash President Trump and his Administration put them through in seeking to block November SNAP benefits during the government shutdown” and argued that the new guidance is “effectively depriving thousands of lawful permanent residents of food assistance benefits that Congress intended be available.”
OBBBA provides the statutory backdrop for both fights. A September 2025 Congressional Research Service primer on the law describes SNAP as a means-tested entitlement intended to “increase the food purchasing power of eligible low-income households so they can purchase a nutritionally adequate low cost diet.” The report explains that households qualify either by meeting income and asset tests or through “categorical eligibility” if they receive certain other benefits, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Earlier CRS work on “broad-based categorical eligibility” found that, by 2016, more than 40 states used TANF-funded non-cash benefits to confer SNAP categorical eligibility on a wider range of low-income households. Many of those states eliminated asset tests for those households, while still calculating SNAP benefits using the usual net-income rules.
The newer CRS analysis of H.R. 1, which became OBBBA when President Donald Trump signed it into law, notes that the law’s nutrition provisions were designed to reduce SNAP and related spending by almost $300 billion over a decade, in part by limiting future reevaluations of the Thrifty Food Plan, expanding work requirements and tightening state options for broad-based categorical eligibility. A May 2025 American Enterprise Institute report on “cost saving reforms” to SNAP identified ending broad-based categorical eligibility and narrowing access for some mixed-status households as one of four main levers to meet the reconciliation bill’s deficit reduction targets. Together, those documents show that the Trump administration’s immigrant-eligibility guidance is being implemented in a policy environment that explicitly prioritizes SNAP spending cuts.
The lawsuit, however, focuses less on budget politics than on statutory meaning and administrative law. The plaintiff states argue that USDA’s Oct. 31 memo misreads the text and history of the Food and Nutrition Act by treating refugees, asylees, and parolees who have adjusted to lawful permanent residence as permanently ineligible, and that the agency failed to follow required procedures before adopting a change with sweeping consequences for immigrant families. They also challenge USDA’s decision to start the 120 day “variance exclusion” period, which shields states from quality control penalties for some errors tied to new rules, on OBBBA’s July 4 effective date rather than on Oct. 31, when the guidance was issued. That decision, they say, leaves state agencies exposed to “massive” federal penalties if they do not implement a complex and disputed eligibility change almost immediately.
The case lands in a country where food insecurity remains common and closely tied to health. A national analysis in Preventive Medicine reports that food insecurity in the United States fell from 14.9 percent of households in 2011 to 10.2 percent in 2021, but still affects about 18 million households each year. By 2023, the percentage of food insecure people in the country reached 13.5 percent. A widely cited review in Health Affairs concluded that “almost fifty million people are food insecure in the United States, which makes food insecurity one of the nation’s leading health and nutrition issues.”
USDA’s own research has linked food insecurity to a broad range of chronic illnesses in working-age adults. A 2017 Economic Research Service report by Christian Gregory and Alisha Coleman-Jensen found that “food security status is also strongly related to the likelihood of chronic disease in general and to the number of chronic conditions afflicting the sufferer,” and that “income is only significantly associated with 3 of the 10 chronic diseases… while food insecurity is significantly associated with all 10.” In a 2020 paper in Physiology and Behavior, Coleman-Jensen reported that “in 2018, 11.1 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during the year” and that “35.3 percent of households with incomes below the Federal Poverty Line were food insecure,” concluding that “food insecurity is detrimental to health and well-being and has been linked with numerous poor health outcomes.”
Immigrant households are disproportionately affected. A 2023 study in AJPM Focusfound that, after controlling for other factors, “noncitizens had 1.28 times higher odds of food insecurity than U.S.-born citizens,” and concluded that “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program utilization may likely eliminate food insecurity disparities among immigrants and U.S.-born citizens.”
Racial disparities are also pronounced. In a JAMA Network Open article, Laura Samuel and colleagues wrote that “racially minoritized people experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program… reduces food insecurity,” and reported that “among SNAP participants, Black households were less likely than White households to be food insecure.”
The COVID-19 pandemic offered one more natural experiment. In a 2025 JAMA Network Open study of low-income adults, Yingfei Wu and co authors found that “food insecurity prevalence decreased from 20.9%… before the COVID-19 pandemic to 18.8%… during the pandemic” while “SNAP use prevalence increased overall,” and concluded that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity decreased among SNAP participants in most racial and ethnic groups but did not decrease among non-SNAP participants in any group.”
Other studies have linked food insecurity in children and older adults to worse outcomes across a range of physical and mental health measures. A rapid review in The Lancet reported that “household food insecurity… has detrimental impact on child health outcomes,” while a national study of children with chronic conditions found that the prevalence of food insecurity among those children was 14.8 percent, compared with 9.0 percent among children without chronic illness. Research in BMC Geriatrics has found that food-insecure older adults report more days of poor physical and mental health each month than their food-secure peers.
For migrants and refugees, those health burdens are layered on top of legal and social stress. In a 2020 article in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Megan Carney and Keegan Krause wrote that the health consequences of food insecurity for migrants are “amplified by im/migrants’ experiences with chronic political insecurity, racialized stigma, and documentation precarity.”
In New York et al. v. Rollins, the coalition of states asks the Oregon federal court to interpret OBBBA’s immigration provisions in a way that preserves SNAP eligibility for refugees, asylees, and other lawful permanent residents, and to reset the implementation timeline so that states are not penalized for errors while they sort out complex status histories. If the states prevail, USDA would likely need to issue revised guidance clarifying that those immigrants remain eligible once they obtain green cards.
If the department wins, the Oct. 31 guidance will remain in effect and state agencies will face pressure to identify and remove many immigrant households from SNAP to avoid federal penalties. The same courts that ordered USDA to keep funding SNAP during the shutdown may then be asked to decide whether the agency can rely on its reading of OBBBA to cut off benefits for refugees, asylees, and other lawful permanent residents. For mixed-status families whose budgets already leave little margin for rent, utilities, and food, that outcome would not be an abstract administrative change. It would be the point at which a legal interpretation of a budget reconciliation bill begins to translate into fewer groceries, more skipped meals, and greater health risks for adults and children who live in the United States lawfully but rely on SNAP to eat.
The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai.
About Author
