The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, released guidance Thursday to states to proceed with . 

Child and nutrition advocates are glad to see it resume, but have concerns about the multiple steps needed to relaunch SNAP — particularly around states’ ability to quickly arrange payments through third-party vendors. 

Some 42 million Americans — including 16 million children, the elderly, veterans and those with disabilities — rely on SNAP for food.

“This is a unique situation,” said Claire Borzner, director for Share Our Strength and its No Kid Hungry campaign. “There has never before been a pause in SNAP payments or a recommendation for partial benefits.”

Borzner said states that issued incomplete payouts will need to ensure participants receive the remaining allotment.

The Trump administration first threatened to withhold SNAP benefits entirely for the month of November and then twice went to the U.S. Supreme Court in its legal quest to pay out only some benefits. It also moved to claw back money from states that went ahead and distributed 100% of benefits to their needy residents last week during a window of time when the USDA was authorizing it. 

SNAP benefits have historically not been cut off during prior shutdowns and President Donald Trump faced criticism that he tried to leverage Americans’ hunger— 1 in 8 receive SNAP benefits — to break Democrats’ opposition to ending the shutdown. 

Crystal FitzSimons, president at the Food Research & Action Center, said states are moving quickly to resume aid, though she understands some families might not feel relief until it arrives. 

“It is very fluid and moving in real time,” she said, speaking of getting the program up and running again. “The delays have created so much stress for the people who really need food on the table. I totally understand why they would be worried, but the shutdown has ended and as soon as people see the money in their card, they should be able to take a deep breath and move forward.”

But Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at , an early childhood advocacy group, said “there has been a lot of undermining of the basic government infrastructure necessary” to get SNAP operational again. 

Boteach noted families have been suffering needlessly since the start of the month, making tough choices about whether to eat or pay rent and utility bills.  

“These are the conversations American families have been having around the kitchen table,” she said, calling SNAP a miracle and crediting it for preventing starvation-levels of hunger in this country since the 1970s. 

Part of the confusion about when the aid might arrive centers around the uneven distribution of benefits. Stewart Fried, a principal attorney at OFW Law in Washington, D.C., and an expert on SNAP, said 19 states have already issued full November payments — the ones the administration told to “undo” those actions after the fact — while another 18 delivered partial allotments. 

Fried, who has represented many SNAP-eligible retailers on a wide variety of issues before the , Congress and in the federal courts, said states that issued partial payouts might need at least a week to disperse the remaining monies. The 13 states that sent out no money in November may face the easiest turnaround time.

“For states that have not issued any November benefits, that process should be quicker and benefits will hopefully be issued in the next few days,” he said. 

Meanwhile, low-income families have been across the country all month while also relying on schools to help fill the nutrition gap for their kids, child advocates say. 

Ian Coon, spokesman for the Alliance for Education, an independent, local education fund that supports Seattle Public Schools, said his group set aside $150,000 for grocery store gift cards in October. The school community raised an additional $70,000 in recent weeks to bridge any further gaps as kids head home for the holidays, some to empty cupboards.

The alliance has already distributed $154,000 in funding for kids and families in need.

“There have been increased donations to food pantries,” he said. “Nearly every local business has a food collection bin in the door and restaurants are still providing community meals or fundraising. This isn’t the time to standby. It’s the time to act and we’re so grateful to have the support of our community.”

Erika Roberson, senior policy associate at The Institute for College Access & Success, a research and advocacy group that addresses issues like food insecurity in secondary education, said she’s glad for the 1.1 million college undergraduates who rely on SNAP. 

“When students receive their benefits, they will worry less about where their next meal will come from and will be able to focus on their studies,” she said, adding those who wrestle with food insecurity are more likely to struggle academically, taking on extra hours of work and leaving them less time to attend class. “It’s a huge disadvantage.”

SNAP benefits have been ensured for a full year and therefore won’t be subject to disruption when to fund the government that was approved this week runs out in January. Recipients also still face the effects of the $186 billion eliminated from SNAP as part of the administration’s landmark signed into law this summer.

Borzner called the most recent chaos around SNAP a manufactured crisis. 

“Families should not have had to go through this pain,” she said, adding that the government had the resources to pay benefits in full. “This program could have continued to operate for November as it normally does. None of this needed to happen.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania 

After surviving more than a decade in a Tanzanian refugee camp where learning was limited, Riziki Elisha, 11, wanted nothing more than to attend the elementary school just a few hundred yards from her front door. 

Though she could see the playground from her porch, she wasn’t permitted to partake: Paperwork delays left her sitting at home for weeks, spending long afternoons watching CoComelon, a cartoon created for babies and toddlers.

“I was very frustrated,” she said with the help of a translator on a recent afternoon. “I felt bad.”

It’s been nearly nine years since the School District of Lancaster was for denying or delaying enrollment for young refugees — or for sending them to an off-site, for-profit alternative school focused on behavior management. The case was settled in  

But families, staff and advocates say the district, which serves kids in an , is once again erecting barriers that have left dozens of newcomer children idle in the past few years — some for months. A major contributing factor, they say, is Lancaster’s insistence on tuberculosis testing. 

Other Pennsylvania districts with sizable multilingual learner populations have chosen not to require a test for the infectious lung disease, including Philadelphia, Reading, Norristown, Harrisburg City, Pittsburgh, Lebanon and Chambersburg. Upper Darby does require TB testing. State officials told Â鶹ľ«Ć· schools “should not delay a student’s enrollment while TB test results are pending” and that parents or guardians concerned about this issue should .

Another holdup, newcomer families note, is the district’s need for birth certificates. They can be hard to obtain quickly, and, according to federal guidelines, their absence Proof of address, they say, has also been an obstacle as some families initially struggle to secure permanent housing. 

Immigrant advocates, including staffers inside the district, say these students should be seated immediately while their families are given time to produce the requisite paperwork. The new arrivals, many of them behind their American-born peers, would be able to make fast gains, they argue, if granted speedy enrollment.  

Â鶹ľ«Ć· presented its findings to the district, which said it wants students to be enrolled “as quickly as possible when all requirements are met,” — and those include TB testing for some kids.

It said the district’s clinic provider contacts families directly to schedule the tests and that it recently added a full-time bilingual enrollment navigator to identify and work with families “who are slow to complete the process.”

State officials said schools have been able to opt-out of student TB testing since 1997 — and many do. But not Lancaster.

It asked the state to keep its TB testing requirement for a specific group: newly enrolling students who have been outside the U.S. within the past six months. The district cited recommending testing for those who are at higher risk of exposure, including people “who are born in or frequently travel to countries where TB is common, including some countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”

The state is clear that enrollment should not be held up pending results.

Riziki’s father, Elisha Sumaili, who hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told Â鶹ľ«Ć· through a translator that he was confused by the delay, which stemmed from his inability to immediately produce a lease. The family tried to enroll October 25, 2024, but his daughters were not admitted until November 22. 

Sumaili wants his children to hold tight to their education so they might one day become doctors. Instead, Riziki and her high school-age sister were kept out of the classroom.

“When the kids were home, it was really bad,” their father said in Swahili. “It was bringing the family a lot of distress.” 

Carolin Cruz, 29 and from the Dominican Republic, has always prioritized education, both for herself and her daughter. Cruz completed more than two years of college — she dropped out because of the cost — and wants 10-year-old Ferolin to go even further, which is what prompted the pair to move to the United States last fall, she said. 

“I want to see her become a great professional so she can have what I cannot,” Cruz said. 

Public education in her home country is and expensive, she said: She’d have to pay for her daughter to learn English. Plus, her local school was overcrowded. 

“If there are 30 or 40 students, there is no way a teacher can pay attention to any one student,” she said. 

She hoped for much better in the United States, but her daughter’s start date was delayed by two months, primarily because of the TB testing requirement. When she tried to schedule the shots, Cruz said she was told the only available appointments were weeks out. 

On two occasions, she said, the appointments were cancelled. 

Ferolin, a fourth grader who loves mathematics, said she felt sad sitting at home. 

“I was not doing anything,” she said through a translator. “I wanted to go to school so I can learn more. I would get up, help my mother around the house, and then I would be on my mother’s cell phone watching TikTok and YouTube.”

Fifteen-year-old Kevin, whose family asked that their last name not be used because of immigration-related concerns, suffered the same fate — except his went on for several months. 

His family fled Cuba because the country lacked a “functioning economy,” Kevin’s mother Neydis told Â鶹ľ«Ć·. They arrived in the U.S. in March 2024. 

Neydis’s husband, a medical doctor in his home country, wanted his son to enroll in eighth grade right away. Kevin tried to register for school on April 16, 2024, but wasn’t seated until the next school year on August 26 — mostly because of immunizations and the TB test. His mother said they sent the TB results to enrollment staffers several times and assumed they would call back with a start date, but the call never came. The family was forced to restart enrollment because the process had dragged on for so long.

Kevin spent those months at home surfing the internet and watching nature programs. 

“It was boring, I would just sit on that sofa,” he said through a translator, pointing to a cream-colored couch in the living room. 

By the time the district admitted him, he had missed the rest of his eighth-grade year and had to go right into high school.

Born in a forest

Such delays are not unique: Rwamucyo Karekezi, who served as Â鶹ľ«Ć·â€™s translator with the Sumaili family, is a refugee and immigrant community organizer with Church World Service. He estimates that he’s helped more than 100 children register in Lancaster public schools between 2021 and 2024. 

Karekezi, who noted that he was not speaking on behalf of Church World Service, said month-long delays are common — most of the children he worked with experienced them — and stressful on the families. 

Vaccinations play a key role in the delays, he said, as does proof of address. Many families initially live in temporary housing — Airbnbs and hotels — and can’t quickly prove they reside in the district, he said. 

“Sometimes it takes months to find a house,” he noted. “This becomes a challenge for registration to go smoothly.”

As for birth certificates, some children around the world aren’t issued such formal documents upon their birth — or their families might lose them in their chaotic journey to safety. Karekezi, 30 and who is also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, understands their plight.  

“I never had a birth certificate,” he said. “I was born in a forest, not a hospital. In Congo, they don’t register kids like that. And even when you bring a birth certificate, they don’t recognize it: It’s a scrap of paper in another language.”

Karekezi said he sent the district follow-up emails on students’ behalf, but they did little to expedite the process. 

While Lancaster has its own history of refusing or slow walking newcomer students’ registration, related issues are now playing out on the national stage: President Donald Trump pledges to deport undocumented families — — and opened schools to immigration enforcement actions. 

His conservative allies in multiple states seek to in a direct challenge to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision.

Likewise, federal budget cuts have crippled the agencies that help immigrant families most, including , a faith-based group founded just after World War II that resettled more than 100,000 people in the United States in its first decade. Trump recently and even though that move was blocked in the court, he said it will . 

Lancaster’s local Church World Service office has recently shrunk in size and capacity. Once located inside a massive building on a well-traveled block, it’s now squeezed into an alleyway hidden by parking garages. It had to drastically cut services when it was forced to furlough 40 of its 67 staff members for three months at the end of January. Valentina Ross, its director, said she hopes to call some of those staffers back into the office soon.

After lost learning, big gains

Riziki Elisha has made great strides since starting elementary school just days before last year’s Thanksgiving break, her English language development teacher Laura Kanagy said. 

“In three months, Riziki went from knowing three- or four-letter sounds to reading and writing short sentences,” the educator noted. “She can identify the hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere. She can add and subtract triple digits and fractions. Imagine what she’d be doing if we had been able to work with her for those extra months?”

Kanagy, who has taught at the district for 14 years, said she and her fellow educators “want the most time possible” with these new students. 

“Each day that they sat at home in front of their TVs was a lost day of learning: 10 new vocabulary words, a few letter sounds closer to reading, a math skill important to navigating the grocery store, a social phrase to connect with peers,” the teacher said. 

Enrollment also means these students — and their families — have access to myriad services, including English and GED classes for their parents, help obtaining eye glasses, clothing, food, dental care and other necessities.  

“The sooner they have access to English and literacy/math skills, the sooner they — and, therefore, their families — can make more of their own choices about how to live and participate here,” she said.

Once admitted, Neydis’ mother said her son, Kevin’s experience at the school was excellent.

“The teachers are nice and just go out of their way using different teaching strategies — a game or whatever they could come up with — to help him learn,” she said. “He would come home very excited, very, very content. And this was a huge relief for me.”

When Ferolin Nunez Cruz finally enrolled — she started the process on December 2, 2024, and wasn’t seated until January 27 — she thrived in the classroom. Since then, she’s begun using simple phrases in English around the house, her mother said, including “yes,” “hi” and “good morning” and shares what she’s gleaned with her mom and other relatives, helping them crack the language divide. 

“She is more focused in regards to her learning,” Cruz said of her daughter. “She is very motivated. And I want to say that I have received a lot of support from the teachers. They are paying attention to my daughter. I appreciate that very much because I really needed that.”

Asked what she loves about the experience of an American education, Ferolin’s answer was simple: Everything. 

If she could speak directly to Lancaster school administrators, Ferolin said she would ask them to make the enrollment process easier for students like her.  

“Help us,” she said. “They have to help us to make it possible to go to school. They should help me get into school so I can learn many things so I can help my family prosper, to help them when it’s my turn.”