A former Department of Homeland Security official accused the Justice Department of threatening to "starve poor kids" to force states into mass deportations.
In a Thursday article for the Defiance Substack, former Trump DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor warned that the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel issued a legal opinion that threatens to pull federal funding from states that don't "snitch on illegal aliens," he wrote.
Under the new guideline, states that accept federal money through TANF or SSI, two welfare programs, must direct all state agencies to report suspected undocumented immigrants to DHS or risk being cut off.
"The families receiving these benefits are mostly American citizens, and the majority of TANF recipients are children," Taylor noted. "So the administration is not threatening to cut off benefits to people here illegally; it can't, because they don't receive any."
Instead, the DOJ and Trump administration are "literally threatening to take food away from American children (and rent money away from their parents, disabled veterans, and elderly widows) in any state whose governor refuses to become an ICE informant," Taylor wrote.
Taylor pegged the money at stake at $16.4 billion a year. He said that the Trump administration put "a gun to the head of every governor in America" and that "the hostages are hungry children." Trump has threatened "to starve poor kids if states don't help with mass deportation," he added.
He called the move "among the most grotesque things I've ever seen Donald Trump do," and boiled the mechanism down to a single line, writing, "You won't snitch? Well, your kids won't eat."
Taylor argued the administration gave away its own motive and pointed to a DOJ spokesman who said the goal was to ensure "DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to." According to Taylor, the statement proved the effort was "about feeding the deportation machine with data instead of feeding kids."