Free Republic

Luisa Fortin sometimes sits up at night, wondering what her clients are eating. She is the SNAP Outreach Coordinator for the Chattanooga Food Bank — but lately she has done less outreaching. Her families, working immigrants in northwest Georgia, are spooked by the political climate, Fortin said. Increasingly, she’s being asked to explain how food stamps may impact immigration status, if not to outright cancel family food benefits. Since mid-January, five of Fortin’s families have withdrawn from the SNAP program. One, the single mother of three citizen daughters, had fled to Georgia to escape an abusive husband. Another, two green-card...

Immigrants are canceling their food stamps over fears they could be deported. Food banks and hunger advocates around the country from Tuscon to Baltimore have noticed a decline in the number of eligible immigrants applying for food stamps and a rise in the number of immigrants seeking to cancel their food stamps since President Trump’s inauguration two months ago, the Washington Post reported. Advocates on behalf of these immigrants say that their fear stems from the possibility that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would notice their participation in the food stamp program and deny them U.S. citizenship or deport them.***SNIP*** Advocates...

Helen Agbapuruonwu “fraudulently obtained public assistance in excess of $100,000 under false pretenses” police allege, and she has been charged “with felony welfare fraud and document forgery,” according to a police report. Fidelis Agbapuruonwu, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria in the 1990s, worked as an associate at Mayer Brown in D.C., according to his LinkedIn profile. A spokesman for Mayer Brown told NBC 4 that Agbapuruonwu no longer works there. Agbapuruonwu received a Paul & Daisy Soros Scholarship for New Americans, which he used to pay for law school at Ohio State University. Court officials believe that Agbapuruonwu...

The very liberal Catholic bishop of San Diego, Robert McElroy, who supports giving Communion to the divorced and remarried, contrary to Church teaching, and embracing “LGBT families,” said that social justice activists must become “disruptors” to counter the efforts of the federal government to apprehend illegal aliens. “Well now, we must all become disruptors,” said Bishop McElroy in a Feb. 18 speech at the U.S. Regional World Meeting of Popular Movements in Modesto, Calif. “We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” he...

A rabbit hole is a scary place. You never expect to find it, and when you do, it starts from the unlikeliest of places. Who knew that the globalist push for a worldwide Islamic Fundamentalist Caliphate started at a small market in Irvington New Jersey? An Irvington man on Monday admitted in federal court to running a food stamps-for-cash scheme that cost the government more than $800,000 over two years. Miguel Antonio Azcona pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Mary L. Cooper in Trenton to a single count of theft of government funds, according to the office of U.S. Attorney...

UPDATE: Sheila Butt announced on Tuesday that she is withdrawing the bill. Read more about that here.Tennessee, more than 1 million people depend on benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to put food on their tables. Rep. Shelia Butt, R-Columbia, introduced a bill that would stop people from using those benefits, know as SNAP or food stamps, to buy foods high in calories, sugar and fat. Some people in our area think the bill is a good idea. "Milk and food items is fine," said Alan Rogers. "That's what they're for. Just to sustain life. All this other stuff...

What do households on food stamps buy at the grocery store? The answer was largely a mystery until now. The United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the $74 billion food stamp program called SNAP, has published a detailed report that provides a glimpse into the shopping cart of the typical household that receives food stamps. The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. The category of ‘sweetened beverages,’ which includes fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas, accounted for almost 10...

Wal-Mart is reorganizing its e-commerce team and upgrading executives from its recent Jet.com acquisition to compete with Amazon with higher selectivity and lower prices. The changes are aimed at making Wal-Mart more customer-focused, Jet founder Marc Lore, who is now the Executive Chairman of Wal-Mart's e-commerce operation, said on Friday in a memo Bloomberg had access. Wal-Mart bought Jet in September for about $ 3.3 billion and is appealing to the startup to push for an online operation that has lagged behind Amazon. "We've talked a lot about becoming a more customer-centric organization," Lore said. "Our strategy is to offer...

Dead retailers redeemed more than $2 billion worth of food stamps, according to a new audit. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s inspector general reviewed billions of transactions through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. It found that thousands of stores authorized to accept food stamps were using the Social Security numbers of deceased persons. An audit released Thursday found instances of potential fraud where the Food and Nutrition Service issued food stamps through stores that claimed to be owned by children or the dead. “We found that 3,394 authorized SNAP retailers (retailers) used Social Security...

It amazes me that someone who can afford to drive around in such an expensive Lexus four wheel drive car can actually be claiming food stamps. She does say at one stage in the video that it would be impossible for anyone to tell whose food stamps she was actually using, her grandmother's etc.

As California lawmakers return to Sacramento on Wednesday, liberal dreams of expanding safety-net benefits and providing health coverage to immigrants are giving way to a new vision revolving around a feverish push to protect gains racked up in the past. After years of pushing forward a progressive agenda, legislative Democrats will be pushing back against conservative policies from President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Congress. Instead of expanding Medi-Cal health coverage to adult immigrants who can’t prove they’re legally in the country, Democrats are now concentrating on how to retain health coverage for those who already have it. And anti-poverty...

The state of Missouri took a stand against the generational dependence upon the government, forcing welfare recipients to get a job. Approximately 41,000 Missouri residents no longer have access to the welfare food stamps program after a new time limit law went into effect in 2015. The new state law was actually a reinstatement of welfare reform enacted during President Bill Clinton’s administration. The 1996 welfare law, which has now been reinstated, limited food stamps for able-bodies and childless adults to only three months out of every three years, America Now reports. Participants would continue to receive the taxpayer-funded benefits...

As President Obama prepares to leave office, his legacy will include an increase in the number of Americans using food stamps. The number of food stamps recipients went up by 10.7 million people, a 32 percent jump, since President Obama took office in 2009, according to data released by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). {..snip..}

An Arizona Democratic lawmaker was indicted for illegally getting food stamps and falsifying her application to the program in June. . . . An Ohio millionaire descended from Iranian royalty was indicted for welfare fraud in December after prosecutors allege he fraudulently took $45,000 in Medicare benefits and received $8,400 in food stamps. Mahvi, 65, insists that he is innocent, that even though he has an 8,000-square-foot home, complete with horse stables, a swimming pool, and a garage where he parks his Lexus, his family gets very little income and lives off of loans from friends.

Now that the Electoral College has voted for Donald Trump as the next president, it is time for America to develop a winning agenda for people who want to be upwardly mobile. Over the past eight years, President Barack Obama’s agenda focused on keeping Americans safe, with an emphasis on food stamps, government-provided health insurance, and retirement and disability benefits. The Left’s policies are built around keeping people safe. In return for higher taxes, and higher health insurance premiums, government will look after us. The extent of the safety net is under debate. Too broad, and people lose incentives to...

Walker has long supported drug testing food stamp recipients, a policy he and Republican lawmakers approved in 2015 that has since been blocked by a federal court. Federal law does not allow states to impose drug tests on recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, better known as food stamps. "We have been forced to delay our implementation and are optimistic your administration will give states like Wisconsin the flexibility to provide the accountability the taxpayers demand," Walker said in his letter.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans are laying the groundwork for a fresh effort to overhaul the food stamp program during Donald Trump's presidency, with the possibility of new work and eligibility requirements for millions of people. The GOP majority on the House Agriculture Committee released a two-year review of the program on Wednesday that stops short of making specific policy recommendations, but hints at areas where Republicans could focus: strengthening work requirements and perhaps issuing new ones, tightening some eligibility requirements or providing new incentives to encourage food stamp recipients to buy healthier foods.

(CNSNews.com) - Soft drinks were the top commodity bought by food stamp recipients shopping at outlets run by a single U.S. grocery retailer. That is according to a new study released by the Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency responsible for running the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program. By contrast, milk was the top commodity bought from the same retailer by customers not on food stamps. In calendar year 2011, according to the study, food stamp recipients spent approximately $357,700,000 buying soft drinks from an enterprise the study reveals only as “a...

Google tells the story at http://food-stamps.com/california?gclid=CIii5Z-s3s8CFQqDfgodqG4Kvg

Eligible Ballistic and Training EBT card If there is anything truly deplorable about conservatives, it is our deplorable lack of imagination, creativity, new ideas, resourcefulness, mental flexibility, and use of language. We could use a really strong injection of humor, and our own late night talk show host on TV as well. But all in due time. First, we have to work on our language skills. Second, we have to stop being stuck forever on defense. We let the Left write the words and terms we use, and that always defines the national debate in their favor. I’ve tried for...