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As is well known, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as 'Food Stamps', provides food benefits to low-income families so that they can pay at authorized retailers for nutritious food to survive.
To this end, the program distributes financial resources each month by means of a deposit on an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card to its beneficiaries who have already met the eligibility requirements and income limits.
The program emphasizes that SNAP benefits are only for US citizens and certain foreigners with legal residence, so migrants with irregular status are not considered, but as for every rule there are exceptions, in SNAP there are also exceptions, and they are the following, and obey humanitarian reasons.
This is how the program's own website describes its exceptions. In the first case, eligibility is immediate, with no waiting period, as long as they meet all other financial and non-financial SNAP eligibility requirements. While in the second case, they are eligible after a 5-year waiting period, as long as they meet all other requirements.
Immediate eligibility
- Refugees
- People who have been granted asylum
- Victims of serious trafficking
- Deportation suspended
- Amerasians
- Cuban and Haitian entrants
- Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrants (SIV)
- Certain foreign-born Native Americans
- of Hmong or Laotian Highland tribes
- Citizens of the Compacts of Free Association (COFA) from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau.
Eligibility after 5 years
- Legal Permanent Residents (LPR) or Green Card holders
- Those who have been granted conditional permission for a period of at least one year
- Conditional entrants
- Mistreated foreign immigrants
In addition, there are people who, regardless of whether they belong to either of these two groups, may be eligible for SNAP without a waiting period: those under 18, those who are blind or disabled and receive benefits for their condition, those who legally resided in the US and were 65 years of age or older on August 22, 1996; people with ties to the US Armed Forces, Afghans or Ukrainians on parole.