REFUGEE FAMILIES ARE THE LATEST GROUP TO FACE SNAP FOOD BENEFIT CUTOFF
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
K.Q. was sharing a hotel room with her husband and four children when she received a card loaded with funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The family had just arrived in Chicago, a city where they knew no one, after being accepted into the U.S. refugee resettlement program. They came from Lebanon, where they spent 12 years after fleeing Syria’s deadly civil war.
She took her four children to the grocery store, telling them they could buy anything they would like with the federal food assistance. It was a rare treat for the family that in Lebanon struggled to make ends meet.
“We are so happy because I can go buy everything for my children,” said K.Q., who asked not to be fully identified out of fear it could harm her application to become a legal permanent resident. “In Lebanon we had [a] hard time, and we don’t have enough money to buy anything the children need.”
But after less than three years here, they are on the verge of losing food assistance, along with thousands of other refugees, asylees and survivors of human trafficking. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax overhaul law that passed last year limits which immigrants can access the SNAP food program, along with enacting expanded work requirements for others. The changes for immigrants went into effect in Illinois on April 1 and are part of broader restrictions on the refugee resettlement program.
As many as 16,000 people could lose SNAP benefits because of the change in eligibility for immigrants, according to the Illinois Department of Human Services.