Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend” thousands of illegal migrants have been taken off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and that there will be drastic reform to ensure those who are truly vulnerable receive benefits.
Concerns about maintaining SNAP benefits began in October 2025 as the government shutdown stretched out. Notably, a handful of Democrats sued the Trump administration to use a contingency fund to continue the food aid. Highlighting how the argument over the benefits shed light on who is receiving SNAP, Rollins was asked to discuss reports of illegal immigrants being eligible for SNAP.
“There’s been a lot of miscommunication out there on the program, but this is one of the first things we did when I walked in. Day One of USDA, February 13th, is we sent letters to every governor in America being very clear that no illegal aliens can use SNAP. Zero, zero, zero,” Rollins said. “We asked every state for the first time in history — and this was in February — to send us their data and let us, with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] and a war room, actually start going through this data to better understand how this explosion of SNAP benefits happened under Joe Biden. We increased almost 40% on this program in just a couple of years under the Biden administration.”
“And since we have asked for that data, 29 states have complied. Of course, almost all the red states, couple blue states, too. But in that data — and I haven’t talked about this yet, publicly — in that data we have found — we studied about $100 billion in spend— we have found thousands and thousands of illegal use of the [Electronic Benefit Transfer] EBT card,” Rollins added. “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. So this has been ongoing.”
Democrats California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his attorney general, Rob Bonta, announced the state would be joining a handful of other Democrat-led states such as Arizona and Massachusetts in suing the Trump administration for alleged “unlawful refusal” of SNAP benefits.
The U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) posted a notice Monday that SNAP benefits will be paused starting Nov. 1, while calling out Democrats who keep voting for the government shutdown to continue. The USDA announcement reportedly follows a memo stating the agency would not use $5 billion in contingency funds to pay for SNAP benefits, as those funds are “not legally available” for that purpose, according to Reuters.
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By Friday, however, two federal judges ruled the Trump administration must tap into a contingency fund to continue the benefits.
Rollins continued, stating how the national spotlight on SNAP exposed the “broken and corrupt” program, and detailing other issues discovered with the program.
“But to your point, what this conversation has allowed is a national spotlight on a broken and corrupt program. We found one guy in six different states getting a benefit. We found about 5,000 people that are dead who are still getting benefits,” Rollins said. “It is time to drastically reform this program so that we can make sure that those who are truly needy, truly vulnerable, are getting what they need and the rest of the corruption goes away and we can serve the American taxpayer.”
“So we want to, number one, most important, get the government open, make sure the people that really need this money are going to get it,” Rollins said. “But guess what? There’s a new sheriff in town. His name is Donald Trump and this program will be reformed. We will hold people accountable and we will be able to help those who really need it.”
According to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo obtained in September 2025 by the Daily Caller News Foundation, federal officials were directed to scrutinize and weed out migrant applicants deemed more likely to become dependent on government services and programs.
While data on illegal migrants and SNAP usage is limited, USDA data from 2022 shows the program provided benefits to 1.465 million noncitizens, with an additional 2.2 million children living with noncitizens also receiving SNAP benefits, according to the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). Data pulled by EPIC shows California led the nation in this regard, providing 273,000 food stamps to noncitizens in fiscal year 2022, followed by Florida with 238,000, and New York with 218,000.
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