CHICAGO – Attorney General Kwame Raoul today secured a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) unlawful demand that states turn over personal and sensitive information about millions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients. This July, Attorney General Raoul and a coalition of 20 attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration alleging the USDA’s demand violates multiple federal laws and the U.S. Constitution.
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“This injunction means that for now, states do not need to choose between following the law by protecting SNAP recipients’ information or complying with the USDA’s unlawful demand and potentially losing millions of critical SNAP dollars,” Raoul said. “Tens of millions of Americans rely on SNAP benefits to obtain nutritional food, which supports local growers, farmers’ markets and, ultimately, states’ economies. No one should be forced to grant the government an unlimited license to their personal information for access to the healthy food everyone deserves.”
States collect data from SNAP applicants and recipients to ensure that those households meet federal eligibility criteria and to distribute benefits. Both federal and state laws prohibit states from disclosing this personally identifying SNAP data except under narrow circumstances. The USDA, which oversees states’ SNAP programs, demanded that states submit personally identifying information for all SNAP applicants and recipients dating back to January 2020. In their lawsuit, Attorney General Raoul and the coalition argue that this highly sensitive data, which includes names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, immigration statuses and more, would likely be shared across federal agencies and used for immigration enforcement, in violation of the law.
SNAP is a federally funded, state-administered program that provides billions of dollars in food assistance to tens of millions of low-income families nationwide, including nearly 2 million Illinoisans. SNAP applicants provide their private information with the understanding, backed by longstanding state and federal laws, that it will not be used for unrelated purposes. Of those Illinois households receiving benefits, 33% contain children, 30% contain adults over 60 years of age, and 27% contain a person with a disability.
Joining Attorney General Raoul in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the state of Kentucky.
