USDA Secretary Rollins Says SNAP Will Be Drastically Reformed After Thousands Of Illegals Removed

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 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 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,