A federal magistrate judge has ruled against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a fight over food assistance for lawful permanent residents, delivering a win for a 22-state coalition and protecting SNAP benefits that tens of thousands of New Yorkers rely on. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mustafa Kasubhai found on Thursday that the USDA's rollout of SNAP eligibility restrictions under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was arbitrary and capricious.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the outcome in a post on X, writing that her office had won its lawsuit against the USDA
over its attempt to cut off SNAP benefits for tens of thousands of lawful permanent residents. According to
Courthouse News Service
, the ruling came in favor of the 22-state coalition that James co-led, resolving the merits of a lawsuit challenging federal guidance issued after Congress passed H.R. 1.
That lawsuit traces back to November 26, 2025, when James and Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on behalf of 21 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia. The coalition's target was an October 31, 2025 USDA memorandum that sought to restrict non-citizen access to food benefits, per the New York Attorney General's office.
Tens of Thousands of New Yorkers at Risk
The stakes in New York were significant. James' office estimated that roughly 35,000 lawful permanent residents in the state faced the risk of losing SNAP benefits under the USDA's contested October 2025 guidance, according to the New York Attorney General's office. Those affected residents included green card holders who had originally entered the United States as refugees or asylum seekers.
The underlying law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, narrowed noncitizen SNAP eligibility while also setting up future financial error-rate penalties on state governments, Courthouse News Service reported. The USDA issued its implementation guidance after the law took effect, creating a compliance dispute over retroactive grace periods that ultimately landed before Judge Kasubhai.
The legal problem, according to the state, was that the USDA's memo ignored protections for former refugees and asylees. Former refugees and asylees who had since adjusted to permanent resident status remained eligible for SNAP, the state argued. The state said the USDA's October 2025 memorandum improperly stripped away those protections.
A Small Share of a Massive Program
Nationally, the debate concerns SNAP eligibility for noncitizens. The national discussion here does not address SNAP eligibility for undocumented immigrants.
The coalition's lawsuit challenged USDA SNAP eligibility rules.
Part of a Broader Legal Fight
The SNAP eligibility case is one legal dispute involving New York and a federal agency. James has also pursued separate litigation involving SNAP recipient data.
James has also pressed a parallel privacy fight over SNAP recipient data. Her office won a court order on February 26, 2026, following earlier emergency relief blocking a USDA data grab that sought personal identifying information, including Social Security numbers and addresses, from SNAP recipients in the state. States argued those data demands violated statutory privacy limits and were designed to create a chilling effect on benefit enrollment.
The scale of what's at stake for New York is considerable. In mid-2025, roughly 1.7 million New York households, representing more than 2.9 million individual residents, were enrolled in SNAP, according to data cited by the state Attorney General's office. The figures cited here are aggregate enrollment totals.
While the lawsuit concerns SNAP eligibility for lawful permanent residents, the broader administrative friction over public benefit usage and immigration enforcement remains active across multiple federal court dockets, including the newly filed public charge challenge.
