Oregon-led lawsuit also secures ruling that lawful permanent residents remain eligible for food assistance

Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced today that a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon has permanently blocked the Trump administration from penalizing states, including Oregon, with steep fines tied to their administration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Oregon and New York co-led the 22-state coalition that brought the case. The ruling makes permanent a preliminary injunction the court issued in December 2025 and goes further: the judge sided with Oregon and the coalition on every claim, striking down both the administration’s fine-triggering deadline and its guidance restricting food assistance for lawful permanent residents.
“Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, we’ve all watched his administration play games with emergency food assistance,” said Attorney General Rayfield. “This is about parents’ ability to feed their kids, and partisan politics shouldn’t have any part in it. The court’s ruling means that Oregon will continue to effectively manage the SNAP program, and our vulnerable neighbors will get the food they need.”

In November 2025, Attorney General Rayfield led a coalition of 21 other attorneys general and the District of Columbia in suing the Trump administration after it moved to cut off SNAP benefits for tens of thousands of lawful permanent residents and set a retroactive deadline that put states at risk of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties.

The administration later reversed its position on eligibility for lawful permanent residents but continued to argue that states owed fines for missing a “grace period” that, in practice, had already expired before the administration finished issuing guidance on the changes.

The court found that the administration’s deadline was unlawful and arbitrary, and that the administration’s guidance improperly excluded certain lawful permanent residents, including former refugees and people granted asylum, from food assistance they are legally entitled to receive. In addition, the court found that the administration’s deadline was unlawful as it related to other changes to SNAP eligibility calculations from the 2025 Republican budget bill.

Today’s decision makes it clear that:

• States cannot be penalized under the unlawful deadline the administration tried to impose.
• The standard five-year waiting period for SNAP does not apply to lawful permanent residents who were previously refugees, asylees, or other humanitarian immigrants.