Funds Run Out After Just Two Months For Revived Massachusetts Immigrant Food Benefit

By Sam Drysdale

After state officials quietly restored state-funded food benefits for legally present immigrants last winter, advocates and lawmakers celebrated the decision, but the money set aside for benefits quickly ran out.

In December, the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey agreed on a policy tucked into a large spending bill to expand Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to all legal immigrants who met the program’s income requirements.

Advocates said the $6 million injection would last seven months — ending right around the start of the new fiscal year, when they hoped lawmakers and Healey would make the program permanent by putting it into the annual state budget.

But the program ran out of money by the end of April, only two months after it got up and running. Now, Rep. Antonio Cabral is looking to revive the benefit. 

“It was like a tease,” said Lina Tabar, director of organizing and policy at La Colaborativa. “To not have the opportunity to provide decent food for your family, then having the opportunity for two months, then guess what? You don’t have it any more. It’s a bit cruel.”

La Colaborativa runs a twice-weekly food pantry under the Tobin Bridge, which sees about 10,000 people every week who line up for food. Advocates say that number has increased significantly in the past year, as the number of new immigrants in Massachusetts has grown.

“We have never experienced running out of food so quickly as we do now,” Tabar said.

The SNAP benefit expansion was intended to capture certain people who slip through the patchwork of immigration laws.

Around 95 percent of the new arrivals coming into Massachustts are from Haiti, said Massachusetts Law Reform Institute senior policy advocate Pat Baker. Haitians granted humanitarian parole or who have a pending application for asylum are eligible for federal benefits under a longstanding federal law.

These are also largely the immigrants who are seeking or using the state’s Emergency Assistance family shelter system, which has grown rapidly since 2022, hit a “capacity limit” set by the governor and has a long and growing list of families hoping to get in.

These families whose immigration status grants them access to federal benefits and the state’s emergency assistance shelters are largely not the same group who the expanded SNAP benefits were intended to target, Baker said.

Those who received state-funded SNAP do not get money from the federal government to pay for food, and are usually living with host families or doubled up in living spaces. Many of them have work authorizations but due to language barriers they work in extremely low-wage jobs, where their American coworkers are eligible for SNAP.

“I feel like there’s a misunderstanding between the immigrants who have been here for a long time and never received government support, and the recent migrant crisis. They think they’re helping the same population, but it’s not,” Tabar said. “We’re talking about workers that have been putting long hours in to support our economy and that are filing taxes, and they have a social security number. But they still don’t have access to these benefits.”

Massachusetts used to be one of six states that offered state SNAP benefits to all legal immigrants who met the program’s income requirements, before the state halted the program after five years in 2002.

By signing a supplemental budget in December, Healey resurrected those benefits.

The program was funded at $6 million on Dec. 4, after which the Department of Transitional Assistance took about two months to make system changes and identify who was legally present but ineligible for federal dollars.

It rolled out in mid-February, delivering SNAP dollars to eligible households retroactive to early December. But by April, Baker said, the state realized it didn’t have enough to continue funding the program and terminated it on April 30.

Baker shared cases of people who quickly gained and lost the extra money to help supplement their food purchases: a Salvadoran immigrant, legally present with a work authorization and working a low wage job, who has been in the U.S. for over 30 years; a family of four from Venezuela with humanitarian parole, approved for state benefits, who didn’t qualify for federal SNAP; an individual from Uganda with a pending asylum case and in treatment for cancer, which impacted their earnings and they could no longer afford food on top of rent; a parent of two children pending asylum and awaiting work authorization documents, who cannot yet legally work in the U.S. to support their family and qualified for, then lost, about $400 per month in SNAP to pay for the family’s food.

“These are families who will get back on their feet if given the tools to do so,” Baker said. “For people whose relationship to their own governments, in their own countries, may already be fractured, to then work with a community partner to get what they need to feed their families — to have that suddenly end is really confusing, and it does worsen trust in communities to get what they need.”

Cabral and Sen. Sal DiDomenico filed amendments to include those benefits in fiscal year 2025 annual budgets, but neither the House nor the Senate agreed to to revive the program.

At the time of the House budget debate, tax collections were coming in below expectations and budgetwriters were hesitant about adding spending to their bottom line, Cabral said. 

The New Bedford Democrat, who championed the original SNAP benefit expansion policy in the 1990s, said he is looking for new opportunities to get the funding — including a House supplemental budget that representatives are scheduled to consider on Wednesday. 

He’s eyeing an amendment, he said, that would re-establish the program for children in these immigrant families with the long-term hope of expanding it to adults eventually.

“The amount of dollars we need, if it was just for kids, I think would be a number that probably could get support. So we’re trying to figure it out,” Cabral said. “I know the speaker and chairman of Ways and Means have been very supportive of this in the past … Sometimes it’s a matter of dollars and cents.”

When the expansion was approved in December, Senate President Karen Spilka voiced her support for the program.

“Massachusetts is better off when the most vulnerable in our communities are cared for,” Spilka said. “Access to food is a priority, no matter where you come from or what part of the Commonwealth you live in, and I was happy to see aid for that purpose included in the supplemental budget.”

Paul Craney of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance warned that the funding was “unsustainable.”

“It’s not a long term solution to have an open southern border, broken immigration system, and very generous welfare SNAP program funded by Massachusetts taxpayers for newly arriving immigrants,” he said. “This latest taxpayer benefit will attract more immigrants, and Massachusetts will continue to be a magnet. It may sound noble to some but it’s unsustainable for the taxpayers.”