As the controversy over funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) during the government shutdown dragged on in recent days, the top official in charge of the program pivoted to a new talking point, calling the program that some 42 million Americans rely on, "corrupt."
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins described SNAP at a recent press conference as, "so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt that it is astonishing when you dig in." The message came as headlines highlighted food banks warning of an impending crisis as money ran out over the weekend for SNAP recipients.
The Trump administration announced Monday it would partially restore some federal food assistance payments after being ordered by two federal judges to do so, but warned they would be delayed.
Rollins asserted on X on Sunday that an unprecedented and controversial data demand her agency made to states earlier this year had revealed troubling things about SNAP. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered states to turn over the personal data of all SNAP recipients over the last five years, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses.
"[W]e told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren't getting benefits meant for American families," Rollins wrote.
"In just the states that cooperated, we've already uncovered massive fraud," the post continues. "The Democrat Party has turned its back on working Americans and built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census."
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for SNAP benefits and never have been. Only certain categories of lawfully present noncitizens are eligible for the program, and state officials verify their status during the application process using a federal data system. Parents of U.S. citizens can sign their kids up regardless of their own immigration status.
Most states with Democratic governors have refused to turn over their SNAP recipients' data to USDA, citing federal privacy laws. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked the USDA from withholding funding from states that do not comply and ruled last month that states were likely to prove the data demand was not lawful.
NPR reporting last month found that at least 27 mostly Republican states did turn over data for millions of people to USDA. (Rollins has since said 29 states had turned over their data though a USDA spokesperson acknowledged she had mistakenly identified Colorado as a state that had given data).
In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Rollins elaborated on what she said the states' SNAP data revealed.
"We have found thousands and thousands of illegal use of the EBT card," Rollins said, referring to the electronic benefit transfer cards used by SNAP recipients. "We have been moving people off of SNAP. We've got almost 700,000 people, I think we've moved off just since the president took office. We've arrested about 118 people."
She added, "We found one guy in six different states getting a benefit. We found about 5000 people that are dead who are still getting benefits."
People with experience analyzing SNAP and other safety net programs say such statistics need more detail and context and about how they were calculated to be evaluated.
"We have real questions about how they've arrived at these numbers," said Nicole Schneidman, an attorney with the nonprofit, Protect Democracy. Schneidman represents SNAP recipients and hunger and privacy groups who sued over USDA's data demand to states.
"One thing that's really important for people to keep in mind is that 42 million people across the country receive SNAP on a monthly basis. And so these numbers that are being referenced are trivial in the grand scheme of the millions of people across the country who are receiving SNAP," Schneidman said.
Tracy Roof, a political scientist at the University of Richmond, pointed out that Rollins asserted she had removed 700,000 people from the program, but did not specify why.
"If they're only arresting a little over 100 people, then clearly a lot of those 700,000 people are not committing fraud," Roof said. "They are probably people being removed from the rolls because of recent legislative changes."
Deep cuts that Congress approved to SNAP earlier this year mean that some people are no longer eligible for the program, such as certain categories of lawfully present noncitizens.
And while Rollins has suggested there was something suspicious about the fact that SNAP has expanded in recent years, Root said the reason is "because of the high prices for food and the fact that a lot of people just can't stretch their dollars from their incomes enough to be able to feed their families."
Some in the pro-Trump media space quickly reported that Rollins had found huge numbers of undocumented immigrants enrolled in SNAP, even though she did not explicitly make that claim. The host of Fox and Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy, claimed, without evidence, that "20% of illegals are on SNAP" in a question to Rollins.
The narrative fits into a larger rhetorical strategy by the Trump administration, said Roof.
"The same thing is being done with Medicaid to say that Democrats are trying to provide coverage to all these illegal immigrants, which it's not," Roof said.
The USDA did not respond to a request for more information about the agency's findings in the state data, including whether it had identified ineligible immigrants improperly receiving SNAP benefits.
Even before Rollins' latest comments, right-wing influencers have been promoting false claims about immigrants accessing SNAP on social media.
Noncitizens account for less than five percent of SNAP beneficiaries, according to USDA data from 2023. "Immigrants who are eligible take up SNAP at lower rates than U.S.-born people," said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. program at Migration Policy Institute. Gelatt said participation rates are especially low for eligible members in mixed status families.
The USDA is verifying the citizenship or immigration status of all SNAP recipients whose data they receive from states, according to the USDA's filings in federal court. The agency is using a federal data system known as SAVE that the Trump administration has turned into a citizenship look up tool by linking various data sets for the first time. USDA has not yet revealed the findings of its SAVE checks.
Protect Democracy's Nicole Schneidman said she had concerns at the outset of USDA's data collection from states that it could be used to bolster an inaccurate narrative about fraud to justify shrinking the program.
"These claims, and the strategy of trying to undermine the caliber of a fundamental social safety net in this country, is exactly what we always feared would transpire should they receive this data from the states and manipulate it for these kinds of ends," Schneidman said.
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