Free Republic

It's been nearly six months since Donald Trump took office, and some families with illegal aliens get food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) while identical all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income do not receive them. This is not a question of treating illegal aliens like other residents of this country, it is clear-cut discrimination against citizens and in favor of illegals.

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 Since mid-January, five of Fortin’s families have withdrawn from the SNAP program.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...

Illegal immigrant households tapping into the federal food stamp program are receiving $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion a year despite their ineligibility, according to a new analysis of the Agriculture Department program. And rules guiding who can get food stamps favor households with illegal immigrants over all-U.S. citizen homes, according to the detailed report from the Center for Immigration Studies released Monday morning. CIS expert David North has determined that 460,000 to 700,000 households with mix of legal and illegal immigrants are participating in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The Gang of Eight’s immigration bill could make illegal immigrants eligible for state and local welfare benefits almost immediately after it is passed, according to Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), one of the proposal’s leading critics. Further, he contends, some particular categories of amnestied immigrants and their relatives would be eligible for federal benefits long before the 13-year waiting period usually cited by the bill’s advocates, such as Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), who challenged Sessions’s argument in a press release on Tuesday. These are just a couple of reasons why Sessions and others are calling on the Gang of...

TWEET For decades the U.S. government has knowingly given illegal immigrants food stamps, according to a former certification case worker who denounced the costly practice back in the 1980s but was essentially ordered to keep a lid on it.The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they...

Welfare: Not content with having more Americans on food stamps than people in Spain, the Obama administration is ringing the dinner bell for illegal aliens. We'll feed you and not check your status. As we wrote last July, just as food stamp use has skyrocketed here under President Obama, so have marketing efforts to Hispanics under a partnership with Mexico. We dubbed the program "Fat and Furious" after the administration's gun-running program that also seemingly had worthy goals but had unclear motives and pernicious effects. "USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible...

A government watchdog group has discovered that the United States government is advising Spanish-speaking residents that they need not declare their immigration status to qualify for food stamps. Judicial Watch obtained the Spanish-language flyers through a Freedom of Information Act request and announced on Thursday that the "promotion of the food stamp program, now known as 'SNAP' (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA. A statement on the flyer—emphasized in bold and underlined—reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.” Judicial Watch...

Conservative legal group obtained Agriculture Department flyerYou need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children'Program in all 50 Mexican consulates in the U.S. helps push food stamps A Spanish-language leaflet that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided to the Mexican Embassy in Washington advises border-crossing Mexicans that they can collect taxpayer-funded food stamp benefits for their children without admitting that they're illegal immigrants. Underlined and in boldface type, the document tells immigrants who are unlawfully in the United States that, 'You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking...

The Obama administration met with Mexican officials and held other events to discuss enrollment in food stamps and similar programs roughly 30 times since President Obama took office, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack revealed in a recent letter to Congress. They were among 151 documented meetings and events held since 2004, when the United States and Mexico first started partnering on food-stamp awareness. That partnership, though, has raised alarm with Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who is concerned the collaboration amounts to a vehicle for the USDA to pressure people onto the food-stamp rolls -- in this case, noncitizen immigrants from Mexico....