For a Syrian refugee in Iowa who goes by Kamran, losing federal food assistance has reopened old wounds.
“It’s like we are back again in Syria, and we, we feel lost, like we did in Syria,” Kamran told WMUR. His wife and six children rely on a single income, and his refugee status now disqualifies him from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. “If we have the means, we cook our own food. And if we don’t, we will just eat bread,” he said. “Everything is expensive for us, including the house and the food.”
Kamran’s family is one of many swept up in restrictions on SNAP under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping Republican budget law signed in July 2025. The law slashes $187 billion — nearly 20% — from the federal food assistance program through 2034. Among its earliest changes: most lawfully present noncitizens without permanent resident status — refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking victims, and survivors of domestic violence — are no longer eligible for federal food aid.
About 90,000 people will lose SNAP in an average month as a result of those noncitizen restrictions alone, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The affected families stand to lose roughly $210 a month in food purchasing power, the CBO estimates.
The refugee cuts are part of a much broader collapse in the program. More than 4 million people have lost food aid since last July, and monthly SNAP enrollment has dropped from 42 million to 37 million as of April — an 11 percent decline, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “In July of 2025, Republicans in Congress enacted the deepest cuts to SNAP in history,” Ty Jones Cox, CBPP’s vice president for food assistance, told NPR.
The strain is showing up at food pantries across Iowa. At the Urbandale Food Pantry in suburban Des Moines, the drop-in room where visitors come daily for food has been averaging 390 visits a day, with last week setting a record at 397. “Our shelves can be full, as you can see today. There’s not a lot on our shelves because access to the anytime room has increased dramatically,” CEO Patty Sneddon-Kisting said.
For a woman who calls herself Danielle — who came to Iowa as a refugee after growing up in a camp in Kenya — the cuts have left her feeling trapped. “It feels devastating,” she told WMUR. “You feel as if your life is in limbo and you feel as if your life is not moving forward.”
Advocates stress that refugees are distinct from other immigrant groups. They arrive after an intensive, years-long vetting process and are formally invited to resettle by the U.S. government — a policy that has historically drawn bipartisan support. Even Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration levels, acknowledged: “It’s a relatively small population of people that we generally accept have a lot of need.”
A February 2024 Department of Health and Human Services report found that between 2005 and 2019, refugees and asylum seekers collectively contributed $123.8 billion more to federal, state, and local governments in taxes than they received in public benefits.
The SNAP restriction is not the only loss. The law revokes refugees’ access to Medicaid beginning in October 2026 and cuts the window of federal resettlement support from one year to four months.
Starting this October, states will also face sharply higher costs to sustain SNAP for everyone: the federal government’s share of administrative expenses drops from 50 percent to 25 percent, shifting the burden onto state budgets. Georgetown’s Center on Poverty and Inequality estimates that states will need to spend two to three times more on SNAP to keep the program running. In a survey by the Urban Institute and the American Public Human Services Association, 29 percent of states said they may further narrow eligibility and 11 percent said they may need to withdraw from SNAP altogether.
Private charity cannot absorb a gap of this size. “A lot of families, they may starve,” Muzhda Oriakhil of Friends of Refugees, an Atlanta-area refugee resettlement nonprofit, told KFF Health News.