Yesterday, Donald Trump’s Justice Department put a gun to the head of every governor in America. The hostages are hungry children.
DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a new legal opinion declaring that welfare and food assistance will be withheld from poor families in states that don’t comply with the president’s immigration agenda. Under the new guidance, states are being ordered to report anyone who is believed to be in the country illegally to the Trump administration or risk losing the money.
Specifically, states accepting federal funds through TANF (the program that provides cash assistance to America’s poorest families) or SSI (which supports low-income seniors and disabled people) are now obligated to have all state agencies report signs of illegal immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. That means Trump is effectively requiring every DMV, public hospital, and school district to participate in his mass deportation campaign. And if they don’t — if they decline to convert their workforces into a deportation intelligence service? Then DOJ can pull the plug on $16.4 billion a year that feeds and houses needy families in all fifty states.
I’ll be honest with you. I was writing about something else this morning when I saw this come across the wires. I set everything down to focus on this. It’s among the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen Donald Trump do. And that’s saying something, especially for someone who sat through meetings of him talking about blowing the legs out from under innocent people to prevent them from reaching the border… or grinning about how he’d try to impale wall-climbers… or demanding the reinstatement and expansion of family separation.
The extortion being put in place here is worse than the headline. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for TANF or SSI benefits. They never have been. The families receiving these benefits are mostly American citizens, and the majority of TANF recipients are children. So the administration is not threatening to cut off benefits to people here illegally; it can’t, because they don’t receive any. Instead, they’re literally threatening to take food away from American children (and rent money away from their parents, disabled veterans, and elderly widows) in any state whose governor refuses to become an ICE informant.
You thought Trump wouldn’t take away food from children and throw old ladies into the streets — threatening them like a gangster in a B-movie? Well, folks, that’s what this is, dressed up in acronyms. I don’t know how much more plainly I could put it.
If this feels familiar, it should. During last year’s government shutdown, the Trump administration announced it would pay zero food stamp benefits to the 42 million Americans who rely on them, breaking with every prior administration of both parties which tried to find money to keep food stamps going even when the government shut down. When a federal judge ordered Trump to fund the program, the administration fought the order all the way to the Supreme Court. Rather than feed people! And when some states went ahead and issued full benefits to hungry families, the administration ordered them to undo the payments, threatening financial penalties against states that had already put grocery money on poor families’ cards.
The administration was accused, correctly, of using the stomachs of children as leverage in a political fight. Of course, Trump officials indignantly denied doing any such thing. Yet we now know for sure that the denials were always false. We have the proof. Because they’re doing it again, and this time they’re admitting to the leverage in writing.
Apparently, Trump’s team learned that “starving children” was a powerful threat. Sure, they were accused of being ghouls. But in the end, they got their way after Democrats helped pass a budget bill. And they liked it. So children’s stomachs are back on the negotiating table, except now it isn’t for a temporary standoff to end a federal shutdown. They’re making it a permanent policy, an ongoing threat against any state that refuses to do Donald Trump’s bidding by becoming a deportation machine.
You won’t snitch? Well, your kids won’t eat.
The administration insists this new move is merely a “clarification.” For nearly thirty years, under a 1998 legal opinion, the reporting requirement in welfare law applied narrowly, to the specific agencies administering the programs. In other words, if states knew that someone was illegally getting the welfare benefits and in the country illegally, they needed to report it. Every administration of both parties agreed with that reading — including Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and, notably, the first Trump administration. Now with Trump eager to crank up deportation numbers, the DOJ has “discovered” that Congress secretly meant to deputize every single state employee in America into an illegal immigration informant.
DOJ’s own spokesman gave away the game this week, saying the goal is to ensure “DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to.” Aha, so this was never about welfare, was it? It’s about feeding the deportation machine with data instead of feeding kids. Trust me, I won’t forget that admission.
I ran point on federal-state coordination at DHS. I can tell you that what makes this country’s immigration system function at all is trust between Washington and the states, and that trust has already been detonated by the Trump administration. Now it’s being escalated into hostage-taking territory. And it has a constitutional problem the size of the Kool-Aid man: in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot use the threat of yanking massive existing funding streams to coerce states into new obligations. Chief Justice John Roberts himself called that “a gun to the head.”
Conditions on federal money must be clear when states accept it. They must be related to the program’s purpose and non-coercive. A surprise reinterpretation — three decades later! — converting a welfare program into a surveillance dragnet enforced by the threat of mass child poverty, fails pretty much every part of that test. But I’m no lawyer.
A federal judge in Minnesota already smacked down the Trump administration earlier this year for trying to weaponize DOJ investigations as a way to “coerce Minnesota officials” and “harass and retaliate against them” for declining to join Trump’s deportation crackdown. I suspect judges will have something to say about this, too.
Whatever happens in the courts, my ask this morning is this: do not let the eventual legal fight obscure the moral one. Any government that will starve its own children to catch undocumented people has just told you everything you need to know about its values. This is the same administration that deployed undercover agents against pots-and-pans protesters, that detained the parents of active-duty Marines, and that put ankle monitors on Haitian grandmothers.
We are fighting a man who is not just “bad.” As my former boss John Kelly once said, after he served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, we are fighting someone who is “a very, very evil man.”
So here’s my message to governors in every state who will get briefed this morning on the news: do not blink. Refuse, sue, and win, as states have been winning against this administration’s blackmail all year. Fight like hell. This is not only an obviously righteous cause, but Donald Trump has also just given you the most powerful moral high ground on which to stand. He’s weaponizing food assistance and trying to turn nurses and teachers into 1930s German snitches.
And for the rest of us, the assignment is pretty simple. History warns that a country gets just as much cruelty as it’s willing to ignore. Don’t ignore this one. Keep it in their faces. Then use your ballots to throw the faces of every enabler out of public office.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
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