AJ Wark, a third-year maritime studies student at Texas A&M University at Galveston, started the fall semester on food stamps. In May, her parents kicked her out of their home after she came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, taking away her car and money that helped pay for textbooks and other essentials.
But now that her food stamp account sits empty, the 21-year-old has yet another expense to worry about — how to pay for her next meal.
“There are these social safety nets that are supposed to be in place to help stay stable, but now we’re seeing them taken away,” Wark said. “I never thought this would happen.”
Wark is among 3.5 million Texans — including 1.7 million children — on the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, who have become political collateral as the country’s leaders waffle over how to fund benefits for the month of November.
On Friday, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to fund SNAP after states were notified last month that the USDA wouldn’t be able to pay out benefits because the federal government is shut down. Although the president suggested on social media Tuesday that SNAP wouldn’t be funded until the government reopens, USDA has said it will pay at most half of what people would typically receive for the month.
As of Wednesday, Texans still haven’t seen any November SNAP benefits, which could take days to roll out.
“It’s not just numbers,” Wark said. “It’s actual people with lives, people with mouths… it’s people who have jobs…who have children, and I think that really gets lost on politicians.”
In SNAP’s 60-year history, recipients — 40 million of them today — have never gone without a monthly payment. Lawmakers in Congress have been locked in a stalemate since Oct. 1, causing the longest government shutdown on record. Democrats are demanding that Congress address expiring health insurance subsidies and Republicans are refusing to negotiate until the government reopens.
SNAP offers critical federal food assistance to the nation’s poorest citizens, and although many have been bracing for the program’s pause, Democrats in the state Legislature warned Gov. Greg Abbott of the long-term effects on the state: “Suspending federal benefits could intensify an already critical demand for food assistance across Texas,” senators wrote in a letter to Abbott last week, urging him to allocate state funds to support SNAP recipients.
Without the safety net designed to help the country’s poorest put food on the table, many Texans, whose situations range from single parents trying to make ends meet to college students like Wark, were starting to ration food and preparing to skip meals.
A petition on Change.org demanding that Congress pause lawmakers’ salaries and benefits throughout the shutdown has received more than 150,000 signatures. The petition says that “Government shutdowns are not just political games — they disrupt lives, harm communities, and erode public trust.”
“I’m not the only student on campus who’s going to be impacted”
Wark usually gets her SNAP payments on the second day of the month, and as of Tuesday, her Lone Star Card was empty. On top of stressing about exams and homework, Wark is now worried about how she’s going to pay for food.
When Wark first learned that SNAP was being paused, “the first thing that I started doing was crunching numbers in my head to try to figure out how I would make it work, where I could go for food, what I could hold off on,” she said.
Wark is a financial aid adviser for students on campus, but working just 20 hours a week for $10 an hour isn’t enough to cover everything — especially now that her parents no longer financially support her. Wark, who grew up in Grandbury, southwest of Fort Worth, said SNAP helped her maintain a balanced diet during her transition to being independent.
“SNAP has been the difference between canned chicken, instant rice and Pop Tarts, to things like vegetables and actual meats,” she said.
Wark loves mushrooms and tries to put them on any dish she can. “I’ll put mushrooms in anything, tacos, mushrooms, you name it,” she said. But canned foods are cheaper, so until SNAP resumes, she’s planning to rely mostly on canned meats and vegetables.
She’s also planning to visit her campus’ food pantry more often, which she’s noticed has been lower on food than before.
“I’m also kind of worried, specifically for the food pantry because I’m sure that I’m not the only student on campus who’s going to be impacted by this,” said Wark.
To make up for the food stamps she’s not getting this month, she’s planning to cut out some of the hygiene products she usually purchases, like shaving products. Since she’s moved out of her house, she’s been needing household items such as clothing hangers — but she said those things can wait.
“It’s just kind of whatever I can take, you know,” Wark said. “Whatever I can put in my mouth, pretty much at this point.”
“We’re families who are just trying to feed our kids”
Sarah Jones is a 44-year-old mother of two teenagers in Liberty County. A seamstress by trade, she has struggled to make ends meet for more than a decade since Hurricane Ike hampered her small business in 2008. She has relied on food stamps to feed her family in a local economy with few jobs that fit her skills. She has been staring down a month of hunger while news reports go back and forth on when or how she will get her benefits.
“We’re not bums sitting around getting handouts,” Jones said. “We’re families who are just trying to feed our kids and they’re making it extraordinarily hard.”
Jones has been out of the traditional work force for more than a decade. She has filled out applications for any local job that would take someone with limited experience, but even being a janitor or Walmart shopper have been out of reach. Recently, she began running deliveries for a local florist, which helps a little.
Her story isn’t unique.
Liberty County, which had about 108,000 residents in 2023, sits between Houston and Beaumont. More than half of Liberty County’s households are either impoverished or considered working poor, according to the United for ALICE.
For most of Liberty County’s existence, the primary industry has been agriculture, according to County Judge Jay Knight. But that has been changing, and he’s trying to bring new jobs into his county, but that work is slow.
“Most of our people who live in Liberty County go out of county to work,” Knight said. “They go to the Houston market or to the refineries and oil companies down south of our county.”
Jones can’t do that. Her 2004 Mazda that shakes when she drives faster than 60 mph wouldn’t make it far from home. Plus, the jobs she could get to wouldn’t pay enough to warrant burning gas. To move out of Liberty County would mean to leave her village and her rent controlled housing and it wouldn’t guarantee employment.
It is difficult to stock up on food with a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old. So when the SNAP payment didn’t arrive on Saturday, Jones and thousands of her neighbors turned to each other for help. She had been working out a meal sharing program with her neighbors and they have discussed ride-sharing to food banks.
Jones built a career making costumes, clothes and quilts. But in 2008, life hit hard and fast. She was dealing with a tough pregnancy with complications when Hurricane Ike wrecked many East Texas communities — and took her customer base and business with it.
Seeking SNAP benefits was supposed to be a short term solution.
“I was so determined. I wasn’t going to abandon [my business], I was not going to drop it,” Jones said. “But the economy just suddenly got worse, especially for things that people don’t necessarily need, those luxury items.”
Jones then became the primary caregiver for her mother and took custody of her niece. To save money, she kept the kids home from day care. But that meant she had to stay home, too. She took whatever odd sewing or crafting jobs that came her way.
When COVID-19 struck, it culled the number of people willing to pay for handmade goods. Jones began submitting job applications wherever she could. There were 3.4 million other jobseekers at that time.
Little has improved since. The family of three still lives month to month, saving what they can because they know good months won’t last.
Jones has kept her expenses minimal. She developed a personal relationship with her landlord, built on trust that has kept her rent low. She tracks utility usage and only pays for streaming services on good months, when she brings in more than $1,200 from her crafts. But those months are not regular. She runs her household on less than $2,000 a month, including $700 a month in SNAP benefits, which barely meets the needs of her growing children.
“It’s gonna affect a lot of people”
When Edinburg resident Navitidad Noriega learned that she wasn’t going to get food stamps this month, her first thought was about how grateful she was that this was happening during the school year — at least she knows that her two eldest kids will be getting breakfast and lunch.
Noriega is a mother of four, her oldest is 7 and her youngest is just a year old. Since her husband became incarcerated last year, SNAP helped her put food on the table. She usually gets around $1,200 for groceries every 11th day of the month.
Noriega said she’s going to be relying on her local food bank more than before, but she’s worried it’s not going to be enough.
“I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, maybe I’ll get a job but then everything would mostly go toward daycare,” Noriega, 29, said.
Edinburg is a city in the Rio Grande Valley, where the percentage of residents who receive SNAP benefits is the highest in the state. Around 28% of households in Hidalgo County, which includes Edinburg, are SNAP recipients.
The Rio Grande Valley is a heavily Latino community, and in Texas, 1 in 4 Latinos are experiencing food insecurity, according to Feeding Texas. The overall food insecurity rate for Latinos in Texas is 24%.
“It’s gonna affect a lot of people also, not only me,” she said. “There’s a lot of single mothers, people that have disabilities.”
To reserve money just for the essentials, she will forgo the items that typically put a smile on her kids’ faces — cookies, juices and treats.
She’s planning to make her kids sopa de fideo, a low-cost Mexican noodle soup, more often than before. “Whenever I’m having a hard time or whatever, that’s what I make,” Noriega said.
“We would always go without food to feed our son”
Amber Harrington doesn’t know what she’s going to feed her 7-year-old son, Xavier, this week. He is autistic with high needs that will likely last his whole life. Because of his disability, Xavier has an extremely sensitive palate and can only eat certain foods.
“Even when he tries different foods, he gags on it because of the different textures,” Harrington said.
To accommodate that, she and her husband have often gone hungry to make sure the pantry is stocked with foods Xavier can eat. When they were finally accepted on to SNAP last year, after years of applying, it gave them a moment of relief. They appreciated their bellies being full for the first time in years.
Harrington’s husband is a full-time custodian at the high school in Onalaska, a town of 3,300 about 85 miles north of Houston. Amber is a part time cashier at the local pizzaria, Simple Simons. She works part time because it allows her to care for Xavier after school.
Harrington struggles with what she has seen online when people criticize the way SNAP benefits are used. She does believe people need to eat healthier and she does her best. But, the small family also spends some of their benefits on cheesy balls and Goldfish crackers because those are some of the only things Xavier will eat.
Now, Harrington worries all three of them will go hungry.
“We would always go without food to feed our son,” Harrington said. “Our son’s the only one that eats sometimes. It was hard, but when we got the food stamps it helped out greatly. My husband and I got a chance to eat. Now that they’re cutting it off, we don’t know what we’re going to eat.”
Without considering groceries, the couple’s monthly spending sits around $1,500 a month. They rent a house for $850 a month, pay about $140 a month for electricity and another $250 a month for car insurance. They normally receive about $300 a month in SNAP benefits, and they make it stretch.
“We sometimes have to wait till my husband gets paid on the 15th, because that’s when he gets a good check and we have to buy food on that check,” Harrington said. “If we don’t get that check, we don’t have food.”
The Harringtons will go hungry again if benefits don’t resume. They tried to make a plan and save for the shutdown, but then the truck loan payment came due and it had to be paid. They can’t access community food banks because they’re only open when one of them is at work. And they can’t ask family for help, because many of their family members are in the same boat.
They splurged and bought a small turkey breast for $12 last week to put in the freezer for Thanksgiving.
When she checked on Monday, Harrington’s SNAP deposit was still listed as “delayed.”
Disclosure: Feeding Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
