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‘It Does Not Have to Be This Way’: Child Hunger Set to Surge as Trump Withholds SNAP Funds
Two federal courts ruled Friday that the White House must release contingency food assistance funds, but officials have suggested they will not comply with the orders.
Oct 31, 2025
Though two federal judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use contingency funds to continue providing food assistance that 42 million Americans rely on, White House officials have signaled they won't comply with the court orders even as advocates warn the lapse in nutrition aid funding will cause an unprecedented child hunger crisis that families are unprepared to withstand.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is planning to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Saturday as the government shutdown reaches the one-month mark, claiming it can no longer fund SNAP and cannot tap $5 billion in contingency funds that would allow recipients to collect at least partial benefits in November.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that his administration is "going to get it done," regarding the funding of SNAP, but offered no details on his plans to keep the nation's largest anti-hunger program funded, and his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, would not commit on Friday to release the funds if ordered to do so.
"We're looking at all the options," Rollins told CNN before federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ordered the administration to fund the program.
The White House and Republicans in Congress have claimed the only way to fund SNAP is for Democratic lawmakers to vote for a continuing resolution proposed by the GOP to keep government funding at current levels; Democrats have refused to sign on to the resolution because it would allow healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to expire.
The administration previously said it would use the SNAP contingency funds before reversing course last week. A document detailing the contingency plan disappeared from the USDA's website this week. The White House's claims prompted two lawsuits filed by Democrat-led states and cities as well as nonprofit groups that demanded the funding be released.
On Thursday evening, US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) addressed her followers on the social media platform X about the impending hunger emergency, emphasizing that the loss of SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans—39% of whom are children—is compounding a child poverty crisis that has grown since 2021 due to Republicans' refusal to extend pandemic-era programs like the enhanced child tax credit.
"One in eight kids in America lives in poverty in 2024," said Jayapal. "Sixty-one percent of these kids—that's about 6 million kids— have at least one parent who is employed. So it's not that people are not working, they're working, but they're not earning enough."
"I just want to be really clear that it is a policy choice to have people who are hungry, to have people who are poor," she said.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that the loss of benefits for millions of children, elderly, and disabled people all at once is "unprecedented."
“We’ve never seen the elderly and children removed from the program in this sort of way,” Schanzenbach told the Post. “It really is hard to predict something of this magnitude."
A Thursday report by the economic justice group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) emphasized that the impending child hunger crisis comes four months after Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed food assistance by shifting some of the cost of SNAP to the states from the federal government, expanding work requirements, and ending adjustments to benefits to keep pace with food inflation.
Meanwhile, the law is projected to increase the incomes of the wealthiest 20% of US households by 3.7% while reducing the incomes of the poorest 20% of Americans by an average of 3.8%.
Now, said ATF, "they're gonna let hard-working Americans go hungry so billionaires can get richer."
At Time on Thursday, Stephanie Land, author of Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, wrote that "the cruelty is the point" of the Trump administration's refusal to ensure the 61-year-old program, established by Democratic former President Lyndon B. Johnson, doesn't lapse for the first time in its history.
"Once, when we lost most of our food stamp benefit, I mentally catalogued every can and box of food in the cupboards, and how long the milk we had would last," wrote Land. "They’d kicked me, the mother of a recently-turned 6-year-old, off of food stamps because I didn’t meet the work requirement of 20 hours a week. I hadn’t known that my daughter’s age had qualified me to not have to meet that requirement, and without warning, the funds I carefully budgeted for food were gone."
"It didn’t matter that I was a full-time student and worked 10-15 hours a week," she continued. "This letter from my local government office said it wasn’t sufficient to meet their stamp of approval. In their opinion, I wasn’t working enough to deserve to eat. My value, my dignity as a human being, was completely dependent on my ability to work, as if nothing else about me awarded me the ability to feel satiated by food."
"Whether the current administration decides to continue to fund SNAP in November or not, the intended damage has already been done. The fear of losing means for food, shelter, and healthcare is the point," Land added. "Programs referred to as a 'safety net' are anything but when they can be removed with a thoughtless, vague message, or scribble from a permanent marker. It’s about control to gain compliance, and our most vulnerable populations will struggle to keep up."
On Thursday, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) expressed hope that the president's recent statement saying the White House will ensure people obtain their benefits will "trigger the administration to use its authority and precedent to prevent disruptions in food assistance."
"The issue at hand is not political. It is about ensuring that parents can put food on the table, older adults on fixed incomes can meet their nutritional needs, and children continue to receive the meals they rely on. SNAP is one of the most effective tools for reducing hunger and supporting local economies," said the group.
"Swift and transparent action is needed," FRAC added, "to restore stability, maintain public confidence, and ensure that our state partners, local economies and grocers, and the millions of children, older adults, people with disabilities, and veterans who participate in SNAP are not left bearing the consequences of federal inaction."
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Trump Pardons 'Comically Corrupt' Crypto Magnate Who Helped Boost His Meme Coin
"Most corrupt administration in history," said Sen. Patty Murray of the latest Trump pardon.
Oct 23, 2025
President Donald Trump on Thursday formally pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the pardon, noted that it came "following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company."
According to the Journal, Binance has been a major financial booster of World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by the Trump family that has added an estimated $5 billion to their total wealth.
"Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, called USD1," the Journal reported. "It delivered World Liberty’s first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms it controls."
Critics of the president hammered him for pardoning Zhao, whose company willfully flouted reporting requirements that allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers. As flagged by CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane, prosecutors also found that Binance "critically undermined the effectiveness of US sanctions against Iran by providing its Iranian customers the ability to transact with the US customers."
Journalist Isaac Saul described Zhao as "comically corrupt" and said that his pardon would be "a monthslong scandal in any other normal administration" given the role Binance has played in boosting the Trump family's personal wealth.
Tommy Vietor, co-host of the Pod Save America podcast, was aghast at the brazenness of Trump's latest actions.
"Binance willfully failed to report transactions on its platform by al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad," he wrote on X. "But then Trump's crypto company made a multibillion-dollar deal in partnership with Binance, so Trump gave the founder a pardon. Shockingly brazen corruption."
Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC News' "Meet the Press," demanded that Republicans in Congress start doing their jobs and investigate the president's pardons.
"I know the GOP’s tolerance for government corruption has never been higher, but the obvious pay-to-play pardon scam for Trump family business partner Changpeng Zhao must make some elected GOPer squeamish," he said. "A normal functional congressional majority would do things like 'Oversight hearings' on what looks like obvious corrupt act like this one, and yet, cue the crickets."
Several Democratic politicians pounced on Trump's latest pardon, which they called evidence of unprecedented corruption.
"Make Trump rich and he'll gladly pardon you for your crimes," wrote Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). "Most corrupt administration in history. Meanwhile, he doesn't give a damn if you can't afford healthcare next year."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) argued that pardoning Zhao "rewards corruption" and said it makes the Trump administration "look like a RICO organized crime enterprise."
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) expressed fury that the president would feel emboldened to pardon a criminal who helped boost his own net worth by billions of dollars.
"Trump got paid," he wrote. "And in exchange, he is rewarding a criminal who will use his new freedom to make every single American less safe. Get furious. I sure as hell am, and wish we had a single Republican who was willing to support ANY oversight."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also demanded congressional Republicans do their jobs and act as a check on the executive branch—and she warned them of political consequences if they failed to do so.
"If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it," she said.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) noted that Trump, who commuted the prison sentence of notoriously corrupt former Rep. George Santos (D-NY) less than a week ago, seems to have a soft spot for wealthy white-collar criminals.
"Trump’s pardons and embrace of fraudsters—all to support his corruption—is just outrageous," she said. "So much for Republicans as the so-called party of 'law and order.' Insurrectionists, fraudsters, criminals—oh my."
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‘Why Do You Continue Unlawfully Detaining US Citizens?’ Democratic Lawmakers Ask ICE
"This administration’s failure to investigate or even acknowledge that these indiscriminate immigration raids are canceling the rights of US citizens is dangerous."
Oct 21, 2025
Days after new reporting revealed that at least 170 US citizens are among those who have been detained by federal immigration agents under the Trump administration, which Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal called "absolutely shocking," the Washington Democrat joined Rep. Jamie Raskin in demanding answers from top homeland security officials on the report.
Jayapal and Raskin (D-Md.) noted that they previously wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Todd Lyons in February, just weeks into President Donald Trump's second term, when the detention of US citizens ensnared in Trump's mass deportation operation was already raising alarm.
At that point, NBC News had reported on the detentions of US citizens including Native tribe members, which raised concerns about racial profiling—but in their Monday letter to Noem and Lyons, Jayapal and Raskin said the response they got in February was "flippant and unserious," with the officials simply reiterating existing policies that prohibit ICE from detaining US citizens—"without providing any assurance" that agents were "actually following that policy."
"This administration cannot hide behind a broad policy statement, as it continues to unlawfully detain US citizens as part of indiscriminate immigration raids," wrote Jayapal and Raskin.
The lawmakers emphasized that numerous arrests of US citizens by ICE and other immigration agents have been violent.
Raskin and Jayapal drew attention to four specific cases, including those of:
- Rodrick Johnson, a 67-year-old man who was dragged out of his apartment in Chicago by immigration agents who zip-tied him after breaking down his door as part of a raid on his building, and then left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours;
- George Retes, who was pepper-sprayed and detained for three days in a raid on a farm where he worked, with agents refusing to look at his ID and then denying him his right to see an attorney or make a phone call;
- Julio Noriega, a 54-year-old man who was handcuffed by ICE officers and loaded into a van while he was handing out copies of his resume to businesses in Berwyn, Illinois; and
- Leonardo Garcia Venegas, who was arrested twice during worksite raids in Alabama, even after showing agents his REAL ID that proved his US citizenship.
Other cases not mentioned in the letter include those of Job Garcia, a photographer who was tackled and held on the ground by ICE agents during a raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles and then detained for more than 24 hours, and Debbie Brockman, a news producer in Chicago who was handcuffed by agents who accused her of throwing an object at them, and then hauled into an unmarked vehicle that crashed into another car as it sped away—only to be released later that day with no charges.
Raskin and Jayapal accused Noem and Lyons of overseeing a "lawless 'detain first, ask questions later' approach to immigration
enforcement" that is "terrorizing communities across the country."
"Masked, armed agents are snatching people on the street and refusing to identify themselves," said the lawmakers. "US citizens are now afraid to speak Spanish in public and are carrying their passports everywhere they go. This administration’s failure to investigate or even acknowledge that these indiscriminate immigration raids are canceling the rights of US citizens is dangerous."
Jayapal and Raskin demanded that Noem and Lyons provide an accounting of all the US citizens who have been detained with their identities, the length of time they were held, and their criminal records if they had any—which, according to an analysis by the CATO Institute in June, a majority of people arrested by ICE this year have not.
"We once again demand that you immediately provide a full accounting of all cases in which US citizens have been detained since January 20, 2025," said the Democrats, "and explain any concrete steps your agencies are implementing to prevent such abuses from continuing."
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