More than 14,000 legal immigrants in the state are in for a big surprise late January when they open a letter from the Department of Social and Health Services and discover their State Food Assistance benefits are ending Jan. 31.
The state is terminating the program due to budget cuts. The letter will be the first notice that their benefits will stop and many won't understand why, said Linda Stone, food policy director for the Seattle-based Children's Alliance.
The program provides help to immigrants who don't qualify for federal food stamps. It looks and works just like that federal program: DSHS issues a debit-like card and loads a certain dollar amount on it each month for recipients to use. The forms and cards are exactly alike, so many immigrants don't know their benefits come from the state and not the feds, Stone said.
Nearly 6,000 of the Food Assistance Program recipients live in King County and depend on the benefits to eat, said Victor Loo of Asian Counseling and Referral Service, a nonprofit that works with the city's poorest immigrants in Rainier Valley. Roughly 300 of the agency's clients rely on the program and will not be able to put food on the table without it, he said.
"These immigrants and refugees are of the lowest or no income, some of them newly arrived Burmese or Bhutanese who only have one set of clothing and shoes when they arrive," Loo wrote in an e-mail. "To them, with no SFA, their families will go hungry."