California Sues After Trump Demands Access to Sensitive Data About Food Stamp Recipients

Residents without lawful legal status in the U.S. are not eligible for SNAP benefits. However, during Trump’s first term, he proposed eliminating benefits even for “mixed-status” families where at least one person in a household lacks legal status.

In another example of policies that put California at odds with the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on immigrants living in the U.S., the state has tried to expand food benefits to some immigrants without legal status.

In 2022, California became the first state in the nation to offer about $165 a month in food benefits to about 35,000 immigrants, mostly to recent green card holders. That expansion was part of the California Food Assistance Program, or CFAP, a state-funded version of food stamps.

Advocates for that effort argued that many farmworkers toil in fields for decades at low wages, providing food to the rest of the nation, and then are unable to buy enough to eat, especially when they become senior citizens.

Why states are suing

Attorneys general who are filing the suit argue that the Trump administration’s policy is “arbitrary and capricious,” violates the 10th Amendment that protects states’ rights as well as various privacy laws.

“We’re seeing a number of different cases recently where there’s this Spending Clause violation, where new conditions that Congress never put on the funding are being added by the executive branch after the fact,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “They can’t do that.”

The suit will be filed today in the federal Northern District of California. It is the 35th time in 27 weeks that California has sued the Trump administration.

“SNAP applicants provide their private information on the understanding, backed by long-standing state and federal laws, that their information will not be used for unrelated purposes,” Bonta said.

The Trump administration has tried to tap several state databases to quickly am*** troves of sensitive personal information about hundreds of millions of people. Using that information is part of Trump’s effort to fulfill his campaign promise of carrying out the largest m*** deportation effort in U.S. history.

His administration says collecting the data is aimed at preventing waste and fraud. Trump issued an executive order in March that ordered his administration to have “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding.” In May, NPR reported that the administration sought Social Security numbers, addresses and, for one state, citizenship data, for SNAP recipients. The orders came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and DOGE, the previously Elon Musk-led White House office that sought to slash government spending and was met with numerous lawsuits.