Weekend reading / February 21, 2026
As with virtually all SNAP recipients, my benefits were never enough to cover monthly food expenses. Meanwhile, Trump calls all food aid “un-American.”
Campus Pantry in downtown Tucson in November 2025, where staff set up before opening hours.(Gabb Schivone) When I arrived at the food distribution center on a weekday afternoon, the line seemed to be about a hundred people long. It reminded me of a photo of a bread line from the Great Depression era.
But it was just a normal day at the Campus Pantry, a nonprofit food hub in downtown Tucson, Arizona, amid the abnormal circumstances of national politics. Several hundred people visit this location each day (a 119% increase since 2019), according to data provided by the Pantry – mostly students, but also many low-wage workers on the University of Arizona (UofA) campus.
Although I’ve been a regular visitor to this food center for years — one of several food centers in the area, which range from religious to anarchist to a more secular, non-profit model like this one — that day, I couldn’t wait to have enough food. On October 24, 2025, I received a notification that I had been dreading: I was informed that my November food assistance (SNAP) would not be paid, even though I had been approved until the summer of 2026.
Like 42 million other Americans, I was deprived of federal assistance to meet my basic nutritional needs. Under the insignia of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, the Family Assistance Administration missive read:
“The United States Department of Agriculture has asked states to suspend the issuance of November 2025 NA benefits until further notice. November NA benefits will not be available on EBT cards until federal funding is available to states.”
Since the government close in October 2025, amid a fight to extend health care subsidies that were about to expire — the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, surpassing the previous record set under the first Trump administration in 2016 — it was rumored that food aid, as a government subsidy for those who don’t have enough to eat, would then stop as public workers were furloughed across the country.
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Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Action provoked reaction; Suddenly, political conflict ensued between local, state, and federal governments. A number of states, including Arizona, continued the Trump administration in an effort to force the government to provide emergency food aid for the duration of the shutdown.
Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, told the Arizona Capitol Hours that Arizona, unlike some other plaintiff states, I didn’t have any emergency money to compensate for the damage, then, at the last minute, decided to donate $1.8 million of remaining Covid funds to Arizona food banks.
In the meantime, I had to make some difficult decisions regarding my personal finances. My SNAP benefits had already been cut earlier in the year. As with virtually all SNAP recipients, my benefits (before and after the cuts) were never enough to cover monthly food expenses; it has always been an essential supplement for low-income people like me. But for some, even that is somehow un-American. “The American dream is not coming true [a] food stamp program,” Brooke Rollins, Trump’s agriculture secretary, I will say later. “The American dream is not present in all of these programs. This should be a helping hand, not a handout.”
It took about 15 minutes before the center opened. A group of older women in dark blue blouses were chatting in Spanish next to me in line, passing the time like everyone else. Their names were sewn in cursive on their uniforms, above their hearts, like those of a mechanic. At first I thought they were nurses, but above their right breast pocket I saw a University of Arizona patch that said, “Housing and Residential Life.”
They told me that they were guards of the neighboring university residences. “It must be hard work,” I said, to which they responded with emphatic nods.
While we were waiting, the one who spoke the best English agreed to an interview with me. She asked for a pseudonym – Maria – because her supervisor had limited how often she and her colleagues could go to the food center, so as not to compete with their work schedules.
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Originally from Hermosillo, four and a half hours south of Tucson in Sonora, Mexico, Maria told me she had worked on campus for 11 years. She was proud to provide an education for her two children – an 18-year-old freshman and a 21-year-old student – since UofA, like almost all American colleges and universities, gives a huge tuition discount to full-time employees and their dependents. But although Hispanic students like Maria’s children are enrolled in college at a much lower percentage than white students, they are one of the highest demographic groups of students who use the Pantry. (Added to this is the fact that 32 to 52 percent of all UdA students reported experiences of food insecurity over the course of an entire generation.)
Maria, like her colleagues, is not on food stamps, but she wishes she could be. “I could use [SNAP benefits] because everything is so expensive now with this president,” she said, clutching a mustard-colored backpack over an empty black purse, both ready to be filled with groceries once the center opens in the next few minutes: “This year has been so hard.
But her salary isn’t increasing with rising costs, she said, and she doesn’t qualify for food assistance because she and her handyman husband, although they work low-paying jobs, together earn just above the income required to qualify. Even when her husband was laid off several months ago, she added, they still did not receive food assistance, although he was able to collect some unemployment benefits. People like Maria, ages 45 to 54, make up the largest non-student population using the program, according to the Pantry.
I know the feeling that my income is never quite enough, as a single, formerly unhoused person who qualifies for SNAP due to my low-paid journalism profession – where, amid growing media layoffs and expanding “news deserts,” it is estimated that a full third of journalists are now freelancers.
Twenty-four and 2025 were two of my best years in terms of professional success: I had news And literary scholarships and part-time jobs in major media. But that still wasn’t enough to keep me housed in Arizona. Full-time work allowed me to survive so I could feed myself, but housing costs — especially after two evictions — overwhelmed my bank account, forcing me to constantly move between Airbnb and my friends’ couches (and sometimes in much less comfortable situations), as I’ve reported in public interest stories ranging from far-right efforts to dismantle public education At US-Israeli war on Gazahas non-profit corruption at the borderhas working class homelessmass shootings.
A few weeks into October, I breathed a sigh of relief when a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fund food aid during the shutdown. But it wasn’t clear how long it would take for the funds to become available — or whether the administration would object to the order, which would further delay things and ensure food aid would be suspended in the meantime. Sure enough, the Trump administration made a last-minute “emergency” attempt at the Supreme Court, which partially sided with Trump, block lower court order to fully fund SNAP just as residents began receiving benefits.
And yet, at the last minute, a new cold letter from the same state welfare office that had notified me on October 24, 2025 of the suspension of food assistance announced a reversal of course: “On November 7, 2025, the USDA approved the issuance of full North American benefits for November 2025. DES expects benefits to be available to clients as early as November 7, 2025. » (Even after the shutdown ended, the Trump administration following to attempt to restrict SNAP qualifications by requiring states to provide data on aid recipients, including their immigration status.)
After saying goodbye to Maria and thanking her for talking to me, I loaded my groceries – an onion, a lime, four bananas and a few lunch boxes – into the metal basket of my bike and set off to drop them off at the place where I was staying. I’d lost count of the places I’d bounced between over the past few months — up to two dozen — yo-yoing between housing insecurity and outright homelessness.
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In some ways, it’s as if the pandemic never ended: every day, your goal is to meet your basic needs, in a battle of life and death. But fortunately, some positive results remain. By early spring 2020, self-help groups – like tenant rights unions – were pushing across the country to higher levels than before. Many are still operating in the mid-2020s.
“Gab!” » called a voice from a passing vehicle. I turned around but the driver’s face had also passed. The vehicle turned around, revealing the driver’s face: it was Brandon, a volunteer with Tucson Food Share (TFS), with whom I had volunteered for food relief during the pandemic, in between reporting on the pandemic as a journalist.
Brandon was delivering food at the moment, he said. The timing was strange. Can I ride with you? I said that I was reporting on the current state of food aid, amused by the coincidence of coming across him like this afterwards if a long time.
“Of course!” He motioned for me to get on board. I locked my bike to a road sign and opened the door.
Moving from Campus Pantry to Tucson Food Share highlighted many similarities between the two programs, but with different organizational models. Campus Pantry operates through a director who presides over various coordinators who serve as presidents, with volunteers at the grassroots level. Tucson Food Share, meanwhile, functions like a non-hierarchical structure common among left-wing organizing groups: the larger group decides on a general direction and divides into volunteers who serve as greeters to organize delivery requests; others prepare boxes of food and deliver them to volunteer drivers who distribute the food. Today, Brandon, who is normally part of the preparation group, volunteered to be a driver to replace a pilot who couldn’t make it.
Now five years older than the last time I saw him at the Tucson Food Share house, Brandon looked exactly as I remembered: happy-faced and finely groomed beard. Dressed all in black in pants and a sweatshirt, a temple of his dark sunglasses hung on the collar.
As soon as I closed the door and we started moving, old memories of our work together came flooding back to me. At the time, we all quickly became very close, in part because Brandon and our fellow humanitarian volunteers were the only people I interacted with during the long isolated lockdowns. Bonds of solidarity mixed with bonds of trauma. We prepared and delivered food together; we were gassed together by police while handing out food and water during the George Floyd protests.
Oddly, these nostalgic feelings from years gone by triggered a feeling of guilt that, at first, I didn’t understand. Brandon was still volunteering and I became a humble beneficiary. Could this be a form of survivor’s guilt I was feeling?
Back when I was volunteering, housing and having enough food, even during a global pandemic, didn’t seem as difficult as it does now. Now my priority must be to feed myself more than to feed others. Maybe part of me didn’t survive the pandemic. And the other part, which continued, felt selfish for abandoning volunteering as I transitioned into a self-imposed form of social death or abandonment of community principles – or so it seemed – instead of a constant personal search for food and shelter.
After Brandon let me ride my bike out, I looked at the food items I had collected that day and did the math. A half gallon of milk lasts about a week, two if you stretch it. A box of cereal can last several weeks. Several assorted vegetables, a few canned goods and meal boxes can contribute to a few meals with leftovers. A little bit at a time can go a long way. SNAP makes up the difference by getting cheap staples like beans and rice in bulk.
But what happens in the event of another shutdown or emergency, when the administration decides to “pause” food aid? Many of the hungriest people, often very resourceful, know which dumpsters, which grocery stores are unlocked after unopened, unexpired food is thrown away each day; Which churches have food pantries and what day(s) they are open. The problem is that many receive a large portion of their food donations from the USDA, which halted services during the shutdown. So what will they do in the next crisis? (Most recent closethe result of the federal government’s attempt to siphon more money from DHS – albeit partial and much smaller than its predecessor in late 2025 – was triggering to say the least.)
Often the answer means looking inward and looking in front of you. Groups made up of ordinary people, neighborhood by neighborhood, each engaged in mutual aid – especially when the beneficiaries are also volunteers and vice versa – constitute the first and last line of defense when governments willingly let people go hungry. The Campus Pantry and many similar food centers closed their doors when the pandemic hit, just as the campus that ran it closed its doors. But as of March 2020, groups like Tucson Food Share and its allies, which are not beholden to institutional bureaucracies, were just getting started. Many have since merged or expanded.
But now that the pandemic is over and people still need food, Brandon rhetorically asks the question that motivates TFS and other forms of mutual aid organizing in the future, whether in times of crisis or in normal times: “How can we, for example, imagine a way to get food to people that isn’t in current systems or doesn’t require monetary exchange?”
The answer to this question will determine how people, like all of us, respond to the next crisis and those to come. In a way, it’s already here, as I and millions of others will most likely be kicked out of SNAP due to the Trump administration. new barriers placed on the programwhich came into force on February 1.
Ordinary people need to take care of each other when government fails to do so.
Gabriel Schivone Gabb Schivone is an investigative writer and journalist from Tucson, Arizona.
