Dive Brief:
- More students could begin the new school year without consistent access to food and healthcare in the wake of a new immigration-related federal rule, a leading K-12 group warns.
- The final rule, issued July 20 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will cause a "chilling effect" by allowing immigration officials to deny applications for permanent residency or visa extensions to noncitizens who use school meals and other public benefits like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, said AASA, The School Superintendents Association, in a Wednesday blog post.
- DHS projected $13 billion in savings to the federal and state governments once noncitizens are disenrolled from these programs. AASA, meanwhile, said those savings could at least partially fall on schools, which frequently act as a “primary safety net” when students lose access to key healthcare and nutrition services.
Dive Insight:
If fewer students participate in benefits programs like SNAP and Medicaid, schools will feel a trickle-down effect, AASA warned. That's because those programs' rolls are used to help schools qualify for direct certification under the Community Eligibility Provision — whereby all students are eligible for free school meals and families don't have to apply separately — and for access to School-Based Medicaid services.
A school or district qualifies for CEP if at least 25% of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals. Direct certification automatically identifies students eligible for free or reduced-price school meals if they are already enrolled in a means-tested federal program like SNAP or Medicaid.
In the 2025-26 school year, a record number of schools — 55,362 — offered free breakfast and lunch to all of their students through CEP, according to a new report by the Food Research and Action Center. While school participation increased by 2.1%, FRAC said the “pace of growth slowed substantially” in comparison to previous years.
In total, 27.6 million children attended a CEP school in 2025-26, FRAC found. Three-quarters of eligible schools adopted CEP last school year.
Concerns over the impact on students and schools from the new DHS rule come in the wake of earlier warnings from policy advocates that cuts to these programs in the past year would hurt families.
Both FRAC and the Center for American Progress have flagged that access to free meals through CEP could be jeopardized by the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s significant cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.
Since the 1-year-old law took effect in July 2025, FRAC estimates that over 5 million people have already lost their SNAP benefits.
DHS said it received 8,846 public comments on its new rule, a majority of which expressed opposition.
Some commenters shared concerns that parents would withdraw their children from early childhood education programs like Head Start for fear of risking their immigration status, DHS noted. A resulting enrollment decline could in turn destabilize funding for Head Start and accelerate closures of centers. Other commenters also pointed out that immigrant families could disenroll in SNAP, which would harm their children’s access to food and could ultimately hurt a child’s ability to participate in school.
In response, DHS acknowledged in its final rule that many federal benefit programs aim to improve economic and future outcomes for children and their families and that families might decide to disenroll their child to “avoid negative immigration consequences.”
DHS added, however, that the rule “restores broad discretion to evaluate all pertinent facts and aligns with long-standing policy that aliens in the United States should be self-reliant and government benefits should not incentivize immigration.”
The department also said its regulations seek to ensure immigrant applicants are “self-sufficient” and noted that the "public charge" determinations don’t apply to immigrant applicants who are exempt by Congress, such as refugees and asylum seekers.
