On October 31, 2024, in the waning days of the Biden Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a final rule modifying four major food distribution programs:

the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), and Disaster Household Distributions.

On paper, the changes looked technical:

eliminate mandatory identity verification, remove household address collection, expand income eligibility up to 300 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, and tighten confidentiality rules so information from applicants can rarely be shared with immigration enforcement.

Considered in isolation, this sounds like ordinary bureaucratic tinkering.

In context, it marks:

the culmination of a twenty-year, coordinated strategy spanning multiple administrations, federal agencies, private foundations, and non-governmental organizations to build a permanent system that supports illegal immigration by methodically dismantling verification requirements across federal benefit programs.

This investigation shows:

• A coordinated interagency strategy, orchestrated through White House policy councils, to synchronize regulatory changes across USDA, DHS, HHS, and the Education Department.
• Forty to fifty billion dollars annually in federal food assistance flows into illegal alien households, as part of a $150–200 billion total annual assistance costs for illegal alien households once education, healthcare, criminal justice, and housing are included.
• Strategic planning by progressive think tanks whose blueprints were implemented almost verbatim by sympathetic administrations.
• A complete inversion of American assimilation policy, replacing the old melting‑pot model with a state-sponsored system of permanent ethnic separation and grievance politics.
• A system that undermines American sovereignty, in which illegal aliens serve as the invasion force and federal benefits form the logistics network.

This is not a normal immigration policy. It is an orchestrated national transformation disguised as humanitarian assistance.

Traditional conquest involves defeating an enemy’s army, occupying territory, and imposing political control. Modern asymmetric, or hybrid warfare often aims for the same outcomes through non-military means—economic, social, institutional, informational, and cultural.

When I served as an intelligence analyst in the Air Force, we were trained to recognize patterns of coordinated action that achieve strategic objectives without overt use of force. Look at the current illegal immigration crisis through that lens, and all major dimensions are operating at once.

Economic warfare.
America now spends on the order of $150–200 billion each year supporting illegal alien populations: tens of billions on K–12 education, $40–50 billion on food assistance, tens of billions more on emergency medical care, criminal justice, housing, and social services. That is roughly a quarter of our annual defense budget—diverted into supporting people who are not supposed to be here.

Social warfare.
The system deliberately pits:

• Citizens who followed immigration law against illegal aliens receiving benefits.
• Taxpayers against recipients.
• States trying to enforce immigration law against federal agencies blocking them.
• Communities forced to absorb demographic change against a federal government that never asked their consent.

This erosion of social cohesion serves the interests of anyone who wants a weaker, more divided America.

Institutional warfare.
Agencies created to serve Americans have been quietly repurposed:

• USDA facilitates benefit access regardless of immigration status.
• DHS spends more energy on constraining enforcement than carrying it out.
• HHS expands services for unauthorized populations.
• Education policy and Supreme Court precedent mandate services for illegal aliens while providing no reimbursement to the states forced to provide them.

The institutions themselves have been turned against their original mission.

Information warfare.
No federal agency tracks illegal alien participation in benefit programs. In many programs, it is literally illegal to ask. Costs are buried in aggregate totals. Serious attempts to quantify the burden are unfunded, discouraged, or smeared. Media frame enforcement as cruelty, and illegality as compassion. A system built on secrecy, selective data, and moral blackmail cannot be held accountable.

Cultural warfare.
Over ten million illegal aliens entered during the Biden administration alone. Combine that with the existing foreign-born population and their U.S.-born children, and you have roughly 90 million people—about 27 percent of the country—who are either immigrants or children of immigrants added in just over half a century. This is the fastest large-scale cultural transformation in history, carried out without democratic consent.

The question is not whether this meets the definition of hybrid warfare. It is whether it arose accidentally or by design. The regulatory history points to design.  I discuss this type of warfare in my latest article, A War By Other Means.

On the books, the law is clear.

• The Food and Nutrition Act states that SNAP benefits are for U.S. citizens and “qualified aliens”—lawful permanent residents, refugees, asylees, and a few other categories legally present.
• The Child Nutrition Act uses similar language.
• The Immigration and Nationality Act broadly bars illegal aliens from most federal public benefits, with narrow exceptions for emergency services.

These statutory prohibitions remain in force. Congress has not repealed them.

Yet through a series of administrative actions, agencies have rendered these restrictions effectively unenforceable. The tool is something advocacy organizations began pushing in the 1990s: the “firewall” doctrine—the idea that benefit programs must be hermetically sealed off from immigration enforcement.

The logic went like this: if illegal alien parents fear that applying for food aid for their U.S.-born children could expose them to deportation, those “eligible” children will go hungry. The solution, they said, was to build a wall: no questions about status, no sharing of information, no cooperation with ICE.

Step by step, that doctrine was embedded into law and policy:

1. Benefit offices were instructed not to ask about the status of non-applicant household members.
2. Rules were established to prevent any data sharing with immigration enforcement.
3. Documentation requirements were weakened or removed, so status could not be inferred from what people could or could not produce.
4. Finally, even basic identity verification—showing who is receiving benefits—was downgraded to flexible “processes” and self-attestation.

Each step was marketed as protecting “eligible” recipients. In practice, each step protected ineligible recipients. And the people designing it knew precisely what they were doing.

The key to understanding the current system is understanding its history.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 drew a bright line: illegal aliens are ineligible for federal benefits, except in emergencies. It required verification of citizenship and immigration status. For a brief moment, benefit programs and immigration law were aligned.

But the law left one major loophole: U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are citizens. That meant “mixed‑status households” could receive benefits on behalf of their citizen children even if the parents were deportable. That wedge became the entry point for everything that followed.

The Agriculture Risk Protection Act of 2000 quietly removed the requirement to verify immigration status for all household members in SNAP. Only the person claiming benefits had to be checked. An illegal alien mother could apply on behalf of her citizen children without her own status ever being questioned.

In 2002, USDA issued a key policy memo instructing states to tell applicants that SNAP information would not be shared with immigration authorities “for immigration enforcement purposes.” This came during a Republican administration while the country was fixated on Afghanistan and terrorism, not the southern border. Career bureaucrats, not elected officials, drafted the memo. Almost no one noticed.

That memo established the first formal firewall: benefit programs would not help immigration enforcement. Every later expansion rested on that foundation.

The 2008 Farm Bill codified what had been administrative policy. It explicitly prohibited the use of SNAP information for immigration enforcement and restricted what could be shared with DHS.

Then came the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which did two critical things:

• It created the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), allowing schools in high-poverty areas to serve free meals to all students without individual applications or verification. In those schools, there is no way to know which children come from illegal alien households because you are not allowed to ask.
• It enshrined a new philosophy: verification, documentation, and individual applications were not integrity measures—they were “barriers.” The law’s language is saturated with calls to “simplify,” “streamline,” “eliminate applications,” and “reduce documentation.”

Once verification is redefined as a problem rather than a safeguard, fraud and abuse are no longer viewed as threats to the program. They become acceptable collateral damage.

The Minnesota Feeding Our Future scandal shows how this design works in practice.

Between 2018 and 2022, a nonprofit claimed to be feeding tens of thousands of children a day through federal child nutrition programs (SFSP and CACFP). In reality, they stole roughly $250 million. They invented meal sites, inflated headcounts, and laundered the money into luxury cars, real estate, international travel, and, in some cases, support for foreign terrorist groups.

Why was it so easy?

• The 2010 Act had already expanded the programs and treated verification as a “barrier.”
• During COVID, USDA waivers stripped away the remaining controls: no area eligibility, for-profit restaurants allowed as sponsors, off-site distribution, grab-and-go meals, and minimal documentation.
• When the Minnesota Department of Education tried to cut them off, Feeding Our Future sued, accusing the state of discrimination against the Somali community. A judge ordered payments to resume.
• State officials told auditors that under federal guidance, they essentially needed to prove knowing fraud before they could act—but lacked investigative authority to gather that proof.

The Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s blunt conclusion: the agency’s “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud.”

The significance is not just the dollar figure. This was the same program structure that this investigation documents as sustaining illegal alien households: open access, minimal verification, and an “equity” narrative that paralyzes oversight. The system worked exactly as designed.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 was a proof-of-concept: the executive branch could effectively override statutory immigration restrictions by creating a new quasi-legal status class without Congress.

The Trump administration attempted to reassert some integrity with an updated public charge rule, counting use of SNAP, non-emergency Medicaid, and housing assistance when deciding green card eligibility. The idea was simple: there should be consequences for heavy reliance on benefits.

The reaction was ferocious: lawsuits from advocacy groups and blue states, nationwide injunctions from friendly judges, bureaucratic slow‑rolling, and open resistance from parts of the administrative state. The message was clear—any move toward enforcement would face unified institutional opposition.

The COVID emergency gave agencies what they needed: a justification to waive nearly every verification safeguard in the name of crisis response.

• In-person interviews replaced by remote certification.
• Proxy pickups without ID.
• Reduced documentation.
• Extended certification periods.

All labeled “temporary.”

But as in so many other areas of government, temporary measures quickly became the new normal for those who benefited from them.

The Biden years turned scattered pieces into a coordinated machine.

• January 20, 2021 – EO 13985 (“Advancing Racial Equity”): Agencies were ordered to identify and remove “barriers” to access. Immigration status verification was explicitly treated as a barrier.
• March 2021 – USDA memo: Field offices were instructed to ensure that “fear of immigration-related consequences does not prevent eligible individuals from seeking nutrition assistance” and to reassure applicants that information would not be shared with immigration authorities.
• July 2021 – Public charge rule rescinded: The last significant disincentive for benefit use was removed. The public charge rule made it more difficult to obtain a green card if the applicant received SNAP, WIC, or other public benefits.
• September 2021 – DHS enforcement priorities and “sensitive locations” memo: ICE was effectively barred from making arrests in or near food banks, shelters, schools, and other social service sites—precisely where illegal aliens go to access benefits.
• December 2022 – Consolidated Appropriations Act: Pandemic EBT made permanent; Summer EBT created; CACFP expanded for “emergency shelters,” a euphemism for facilities housing illegal alien families.
• February 2023 – EO 14091 (“Further Advancing Racial Equity”): Reinforced the equity directive and extended it to “others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected”—couched language that plainly includes illegal aliens.
• October 2024 – USDA Food Distribution final rule: The capstone—identity verification hollowed out, address collection banned, income thresholds pushed into the middle class, confidentiality tightened to wall off any information from immigration enforcement.

These regulatory changes did not emerge from a faceless bureaucracy. Identifiable officials directed them with documented roles.

Susan Rice, as Domestic Policy Advisor (2021–2023), brought the “whole-of-government” approach she had used as National Security Advisor. She created the interagency coordination structure that synchronized regulatory changes across USDA, DHS, HHS, and the Department of Education.

Alejandro Mayorkas, as DHS Secretary, implemented the massive parole programs that admitted over 700,000 Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans outside normal immigration channels. He expanded protections for “sensitive locations” and issued enforcement priority memos that effectively turned DHS into a processing and distribution center.

Tom Vilsack, returning as USDA Secretary for a second tour, executed the October 2024 Food Distribution rule that removed identity verification and walled off program data from immigration enforcement. He had laid the groundwork during the Obama years by expanding SNAP eligibility and creating “equity” initiatives that treated verification as a barrier.

Xavier Becerra, as HHS Secretary, expanded Medicaid and CHIP access while building the “unaccompanied minor” shelter infrastructure. As California Attorney General, he had sued the Trump administration over 100 times; at HHS, he weaponized the department as logistics support for illegal alien resettlement.

Neera Tanden, who succeeded Rice as Domestic Policy Advisor in 2023, had previously served as president of the Center for American Progress—the same think tank whose policy blueprints the USDA rule tracks almost verbatim. She maintained Rice’s coordination structure while bringing direct ties to the progressive funding networks.

The Obama administration had established the framework. Valerie Jarrett, as Senior Advisor with direct control over DHS, USDA, and HHS policy coordination, initiated the inter-agency “equity” initiatives that became the foundation for verification removal. Cecilia Muñoz, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and former Vice President of the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS), translated the advocacy organization’s agenda directly into administrative policy.

Jeh Johnson, as DHS Secretary, implemented DACA, limited ICE enforcement priorities, and established the original “sensitive locations” policy that the Biden administration later expanded.

None of this “just happened.” It followed detailed blueprints drafted before Biden took office.

Government employees rarely invent major policy shifts on their own. The real design work is usually done upstream, at think tanks and foundations.

Center for American Progress (CAP), founded by John Podesta, produced key documents—“Building an Equitable Immigration System” and “Expanding Access to Nutrition Programs”—that called for exactly the changes later adopted: removing address requirements, expanding income eligibility, strengthening confidentiality, and treating verification as a civil-rights problem. The October 2024 USDA rule tracks these recommendations almost line‑for‑line.

Migration Policy Institute (MPI), headed by former Clinton INS commissioner Doris Meissner, provided a 127-page transition memo to the incoming Biden team. It contained agency-specific recommendations; roughly three-quarters were implemented. The USDA section (pages 23–29) laid out precisely the changes that appeared in the final USDA rule.

A concentrated group of mega‑foundations finances this policy engine:

• Open Society Foundations (George Soros)
• Ford, MacArthur, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others

Together, they supply an estimated $500+ million per year to an interconnected web of advocacy groups that:

• Draft policy blueprints
• Lobby agencies and Congress
• Generate “evidence” supporting their proposals
• Coordinate public comment campaigns
• Sue to block enforcement or reverse rules they dislike

What looks like a spontaneous chorus of voices is, in reality, a paid, orchestrated network.

Under all the policy rhetoric, there is a simple question: how do illegal alien households actually live here year after year?

The answer is food, housing, healthcare, and schooling—much of it underwritten by taxpayers.

Taken together, federal food programs deliver $40–50 billion annually to households headed by illegal aliens:

• SNAP: Mixed‑status households (illegal parents, U.S.-born children) receive $600–800 per month in benefits calculated for the entire household. Annual cost: tens of billions.
• WIC: Pregnant illegal alien mothers and their children enroll with the weakest verification of any federal program; documentation is “requested but not required.”
• School meals: Under Plyler v. Doe, schools cannot ask about immigration status. The Community Eligibility Provision allows entire schools to serve free meals without individual applications.
• Pandemic EBT/Summer EBT: Benefits automatically issued based on school meal eligibility, with no new verification.
• CACFP and SFSP: Emergency shelters and open summer sites provide meals with no enrollment and no questions asked.
• TEFAP/CSFP/FDPIR: The October 2024 rule makes verification practically impossible while broadening who counts as “needy.”

The breakdown of that $40–50 billion estimate: SNAP accounts for $28–38 billion, based on Pew Research data showing 3.9 million U.S.-born children living in illegal alien-headed households, with benefits calculated for entire households averaging four people at $600–800 per month.

School meals add $5–6 billion, covering approximately 4.6 million students from illegal alien households at 80–85 percent participation rates.

WIC contributes $1.2–1.5 billion, serving an estimated 1.1–1.3 million participants, including illegal alien mothers and their children.

The remaining $2–3 billion comes from Summer EBT, CACFP emergency shelter programs, the Summer Food Service Program, and commodity distribution. These figures align with estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform ($32 billion for food assistance) and the Center for Immigration Studies ($35–45 billion range).

No official federal data exists because agencies are prohibited from tracking citizenship status in benefit programs—a deliberate design feature, not an oversight.

On top of that sits the nonprofit distribution network. Feeding America and its 200-plus member food banks control about 97 percent of TEFAP distribution. TEFAP commodities now account for roughly a quarter of all food they move; corporate donations and retail “rescues” add the rest. State contracts and federal formulas have given these regional food banks de facto monopolies.

As I documented in The Hunger Industrial Complex, this consolidation has created regional monopolies in which executives command salaries far exceeding what one would expect from charitable organizations, while the actual poor they claim to help remain poorly served.

The people handing out food and helping with applications are not just kindhearted volunteers. They are, overwhelmingly, government-funded intermediaries:

• Catholic Charities USA – ~$2.9 billion annual budget, about 60 percent government.
• Church World Service – hundreds of millions in government grants, over 80 percent of revenue.
• Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, International Rescue Committee, HIAS, World Relief, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants – many between 60 and 99 percent government-funded.

They present themselves as faith-based or humanitarian charities. In reality, they function as federal contractors implementing government objectives under religious or nonprofit labels.

Their standard operating pattern:

1. Receive per‑capita grants to resettle newcomers.
2. Immediately enroll them in SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and other programs where eligible.
3. Plug them into the local Feeding America member food bank and related pantries.
4. Provide ongoing “navigator” services to maintain and expand benefit use.

For illegal aliens and gray‑zone populations, these networks provide a de facto sanctuary: services without question, and a buffer between the individual and any federal official who might enforce the law.

Immigration alone did not create this crisis. We have had large waves of immigrants before. What changed was the removal of assimilation as a goal and its replacement with state-sponsored non-assimilation.

Under the old model:

• Immigration was legal and documented.
• Public schools explicitly tried to “Americanize” children—English-only instruction, civic education, patriotic curriculum.
• There was no welfare state. Immigrants worked or turned to family and church.
• Naturalization required English and knowledge of the American government.

The message was clear: “You are in America now. Become American.”

Today, the message is almost the opposite.

• Bilingual education keeps children in their home language for years.
• “Culturally responsive teaching” emphasizes preserving home cultures instead of adopting American norms.
• History is framed as an unbroken story of oppression; the Founders are taught primarily as racists and slaveholders.
• Government services, ballots, and public life operate in multiple languages. Learning English is optional.
• Identity politics elevates ethnic and racial identity and sexuality over national identity, and assimilation is recast as cultural erasure.

Overlay this with a generous welfare state and cheap communication with home countries, and you get permanent enclaves rather than integrated citizens. People can live physically in the United States while remaining culturally, politically, and even economically anchored somewhere else.

That is what makes this not simply an “immigration problem” but an assimilation crisis. It is cultural conquest without tanks. The territory is still called the United States, but the people living in it increasingly do not share a common story, language, or belief in the founding principles that made self-government possible here.

This system may look chaotic, but strategically it serves identifiable interests.

• China and Russia: A United States that spends $200 billion a year supporting illegal populations, fights over resource allocation and identity politics, and cannot muster a consensus on basic border control is less able to counter foreign adversaries. Large numbers of illegal border crossers also make it easier to hide foreign agents in the crowds.
• Cartels: Smuggling networks profit from the demand created by our policies. Knowing that migrants will be fed, housed, and rarely deported makes their product—illegal passage—more valuable. The more illegal border crossers, the more mules available to them to transport contraband.
• Sending countries: Mexico, Central American nations, and others shed unemployed and discontented citizens while collecting billions in remittances and retaining political leverage through diaspora communities.
• Criminal fraud networks: The same “remove barriers” architecture that hosts illegal immigration also makes large-scale theft possible, as in the Feeding Our Future case.
• The global progressive movement: Demographic transformation advances its long-stated goal of eroding national identity in favor of transnational “human rights” frameworks and permanent client constituencies.

Beyond the policy debate, there are constitutional questions as well.

Separation of powers.
Congress wrote laws restricting benefits to citizens and lawfully present aliens. The executive branch has not openly repealed these statutes; it has simply chosen not to enforce them and has built administrative structures that make enforcement practically impossible. That is a de facto repeal by executive action, in direct conflict with the President’s duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Appropriations.
When Congress appropriates funds for “eligible low-income individuals,” immigration status is part of the eligibility criteria. Spending those funds on populations Congress has explicitly excluded stretches appropriations beyond their legal purpose—raising serious concerns under the Antideficiency Act. This federal law forbids agencies from spending or obligating funds beyond what Congress has appropriated.

Equal protection.
Legal immigrants wait years for green cards and are held to strict rules, while illegal aliens gain effective access immediately through citizen children. Citizens are subject to more scrutiny than people in the country illegally. States that try to enforce the law are punished; those who ignore it are rewarded. Whatever the legal theories, the inequity is apparent.

What emerges from this investigation is not a random patchwork of mistakes, but a deliberately engineered system.

• White House policy councils and “equity” structures coordinated multi-agency regulatory changes from 2021–2024.
• Think tanks financed by mega‑foundations supplied the detailed plans.
• Federal food and benefit programs provided the cash and in-kind support.
• NGOs and faith-based contractors provided the ground-level delivery while insulating officials from direct contact with illegal recipients.
• The education and information systems worked to delegitimize American identity and recast enforcement as bigotry.

The October 2024 USDA rule is not a footnote. It is the final tightening of a plan designed to make legal eligibility unverifiable and to leave illegal beneficiaries untouchable—at least through normal administrative channels.

When a criminal organization in Minnesota can steal a quarter-billion dollars in two years using the same system, that is not an anomaly. The vulnerabilities are not incidental; they are built in.

This is why it is a mistake to treat what is happening as merely “immigration policy gone wrong.” It is an orchestrated national transformation, carried out through benefit programs and regulatory changes that most citizens will never read. It is complicity in the asymmetric warfare being waged against us, a war that our own officials and institutions are facilitating against the legal and cultural foundations of our country.

I don’t know who, if anyone, is knowingly complicit. They knowingly created the system to circumvent the laws, promote mass illegal immigration, and help them remain here. I don’t know if they were intentionally aiding in the hybrid warfare that has been underway against us for decades.

The facts are now plain enough. The remaining questions are political and moral:

• Do Americans recognize that they are in a struggle over who governs this country and on whose behalf?
• Are they willing to identify not only foreign adversaries, but domestic collaborators—officials, organizations, and funders who are witting or unwitting accomplices that built and maintained this system?
• And do they possess the will to dismantle it and restore an order in which laws mean what they say, and borders are more than lines on a map?

Recognition is the first step. This article is offered as evidence to aid in that recognition.

The architects identified in this report—from Jarrett, Muñoz, and Johnson in the Obama years to Rice, Mayorkas, Vilsack, Becerra, and Tanden in the Biden administration, backed by Soros and the progressive foundation network—did not stumble into this outcome by accident. They are not merely “helping the poor.” They are using food programs, housing subsidies, health care, and schools as instruments in a long campaign to change who we are as a nation.

Is this what you really want?

What should be particularly disturbing to every person of faith in this country is the coopting of support services for the benefit of a progressive political agenda, an agenda largely hostile to Christian principles, and an agenda that is aiding our enemies more than the genuinely poor.

I showed in the Hunger Industrial Complex how the food program to alleviate hunger is not working. You can see why in the regulations.

The program is supposed to be limited to the needy, but it has been transformed to benefit even the middle class. Are the actual poor being helped? I’m sure some are, but how many are we missing? How much better would it be if churches stopped their involvement in the government’s programs and addressed hunger and other needs as they were biblically charged?

I don’t see in the bible any instruction for us to ask Caesar for the money or resources to help the poor. Do you?

Then why are we in partnership with the government? Why are we working with their delivery services, the TEFAPs, when the bosses’ salaries are way out of line for a supposed charity, their hidden mission undermines our beliefs, and those who are genuinely hungry are not being helped?

What happens next will depend on whether we Americans, whether we Christians, still remember that this is our country—and are willing to act like it.