U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said they have uncovered widespread fraud in the nation’s food stamp program after 29 states shared beneficiary data with federal investigators.
The findings expose thousands of illegal benefit uses, individuals collecting benefits in multiple states, and dead people still receiving payments.
Rollins requested SNAP data from all 50 states on her first day in office to verify that illegal immigrants do not receive benefits meant for American families. Twenty-nine states complied. Twenty-one states refused – all Democrat-run — and two sued the federal government for requesting the information.
“On my first day … we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!” Rollins wrote Saturday on social media. “And guess what? In just the states that cooperated, we’ve already uncovered massive fraud.”
The secretary described SNAP as “bloated, broken, dysfunctional, and corrupt” during a recent press conference.
“The Democrat Party has turned its back on working Americans and built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census,” Rollins said. “There’s a new sheriff in town. [The Trump administration] will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry.”
Rollins said investigators found thousands of instances of illegal EBT card use in the data received from cooperating states. She cited one case where a single individual collected benefits in six different states simultaneously.
“When I walked into Day One of USDA, February 13th, is we sent letters to every governor in America being very clear that no illegal aliens can use SNAP. Zero,” Rollins said. “We asked every state for the first time in history — and this was in February — to send us their data and let us, with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] and a war room, actually start going through this data to better understand how this explosion of SNAP benefits happened under Joe Biden. We increased almost 40% on this program in just a couple of years under the Biden administration.”
“Since we have asked for that data, 29 states have complied. Of course, almost all the red states, a couple of the blue states too. But in that data — and I haven’t talked about this yet publicly — in that data we have found, we have thousands and thousands of illegal use of the EBT card,” Rollins added.
The USDA investigation resulted in dozens of arrests over the past six months, according to Rollins.
Federal authorities coordinated with the Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigations to target fraud operations linked to international criminal organizations.