Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins just dropped the hammer — and the message to defiant blue states couldn’t be clearer: hand over the immigration-status data or watch your SNAP dollars disappear.
At a Tuesday Cabinet meeting, Rollins blasted states like California, New York, and Minnesota for refusing to comply with a Trump administration request dating back to February. The goal, she said, is simple: root out fraud, protect taxpayers, and make sure benefits go to those who actually qualify.
Meanwhile, 29 Republican-led states did comply — and the results were eye-opening.
Rollins said investigators uncovered:
• Benefits paid to dead people
• Recipients using Social Security numbers of the deceased
• Duplicate benefits for the same person across multiple states
“Twenty-nine states said yes — not surprisingly, the red states — and that’s where all of that data, that fraud, comes from,” Rollins said. “But 21 states… continue to say no.”
Now comes the hammer.
“As of next week, we will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply,” she warned, insisting the administration will “partner” with states only if they’re willing to police fraud.
Rollins also noted that roughly 800,000 people have left SNAP rolls since President Trump took office.
The Government Accountability Office backed up her fraud concerns: in a report released Tuesday, the watchdog said hundreds of millions of dollars in SNAP benefits are stolen each year through card-skimming, cloned cards, phishing, bot attacks, and other digital theft schemes.
States have already replaced more than $320 million in stolen benefits between October 2022 and December 2024 — a massive taxpayer tab eaten up by criminals exploiting vulnerable families.
