One Year Later – Restoring Dignity’s Response to the Food Crisis after SNAP was cut
A Feed-A-Family volunteer picks up food for a family from a local food pantry.
It has been one year since SNAP was cut to over 3,000 legally present refugees in Omaha, Nebraska. This report details Restoring Dignity’s response, what we are seeing, and the broader impact of SNAP cuts on the families we serve.
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One Year Later: The Scale of the SNAP Crisis
The loss of SNAP eligibility for legally present refugees and other humanitarian populations has had a substantial and immediate impact on Omaha families served by Restoring Dignity. There are approximately 3,000 refugees in Omaha who have lost SNAP eligibility under Section 10108 of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which restricted eligibility for legal refugees who have not yet obtained green cards.
The statewide data demonstrates how disproportionately immigrant and refugee households have been affected. According to Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services data, approximately 4,600 immigrants and refugees stopped receiving SNAP in Nebraska between January 2025 and April 2026, representing a 38% decline. During the same period, SNAP participation among U.S. citizens declined by 18%.
Within Restoring Dignity’s own client population, we have already identified more than 590 families, representing approximately 3,000 individuals, who have not yet received green cards and are vulnerable to these changes. These are not estimates based on Omaha’s overall refugee population; these are families already known to us through our programs and relationships.
The financial vulnerability of these households predates the SNAP changes. Among families participating in our 2025 Welcome Home Program, 67% reported household incomes of $40,000 or less despite an average household size of five, and 27% reported never having had the opportunity to attend school.
Now that we have sufficient data on impacted, non-green-card-holding families served through our Pathways to Financial Stability classes, we can report that the average family income is $24,700 per year and the average household size is 5 people. For these families, 37.50% have never had the opportunity to attend school.
Many of these most affected households are single parents, adults with disabilities, families with children who have terminal illnesses like cancer, and elderly adults who are nearing the end of their lives.
The totality of the circumstances stacked up against these families makes it particularly difficult to cover hundreds of dollars in additional monthly grocery expenses.
Feed-A-Family: Emergency Food Stabilization
Restoring Dignity created Feed-A-Family in response to the growing food crisis. Feed-A-Family is an emergency food-stabilization program for refugee households experiencing severe food insecurity. Through funds donated entirely by the local community, grocery gift cards are provided to help temporarily replace lost SNAP benefits while families work with our staff to develop a longer-term stabilization plan.
Since the program launched, 59 unique emergency referrals have been made to our Feed-A-Family program by community caseworkers. These 59 families are comprised of 121 adults and 196 children, for a total of 317 people. Our criteria for being admitted to Feed-A-Family are stringent because resources are limited. The families being served in this program are at the highest risk of homelessness out of the 3,000+ impacted people. They are the households where, if food assistance is not provided, they will end up on the streets; there is simply no other way to obtain additional income.
An example is an elderly woman who is nearing the end of her life. She receives $994 in SSI, which covers her rent and utilities. Without SNAP, she is unable to eat. Now that SNAP is gone, she would starve if it weren’t for Feed-A-Family assistance.
Another example is a single mother of 6 young children with no vehicle. She is maxed out on the number of hours she can work, as she has to be home at night; otherwise, the children would be home with no adult present.
It is important to understand that these 59 households are not the only ones impacted or in need of emergency assistance. These are 59 households out of at least 590 that Restoring Dignity has identified through our records.
Families referred to Feed-A-Family include elderly refugees who cannot work, people with disabilities, single-parent households, families with children who have cancer and other terminal illnesses, and households facing immigration or work-authorization circumstances that prevent them from immediately replacing lost benefits through employment.
A recent referral shows the severity of the situations being faced: a family was referred who lost SNAP benefits, and their child is currently undergoing cancer treatment. The family cannot get the fresh food the child needs to properly heal from their treatments. Food pantries are often providing shelf-stable dry goods, but the child needs meat and fresh produce because they are undergoing intensive chemotherapy.
This is but one of 59 stories we have received.
Restoring Dignity intentionally designed Feed-A-Family as a five-month stabilization model rather than an indefinite replacement for SNAP. During the first month, families receive grocery assistance equivalent to 100% of their former SNAP benefit. During subsequent months, the amount gradually decreases while families are connected with food pantries, Pathways to Financial Stability education, employment support, WIC when eligible, and other community resources. By month five, direct grocery gift card assistance ends, and families are expected to meet their food needs through food pantries and other available resources.
The model was designed to provide immediate relief while also helping families build connections to longer-term supports. It is important to recognize that this program cannot permanently replace SNAP. Among families currently enrolled, the average monthly need is $843.30, underscoring how difficult it is for households to absorb the loss of food assistance through household budgeting alone.
As of September 2026, Restoring Dignity has distributed $129,625 in grocery gift cards, funded entirely by community donations. Half of these donations are from a dedicated base of 240+ supporters who give $10 or more per month. The other half come from generous donors, faith groups, and philanthropists who provide one-time gifts.
Amount of grocery gift cards being distributed per month via Feed-A-Family.
A Restoring Dignity volunteer picks up food from a local food pantry and delivers it to a family who lost SNAP and cannot get transportation to a pantry.
Food Pantry Access and Transportation Barriers
In addition to grocery gift cards, Restoring Dignity has completed 185 food deliveries to households unable to reliably access food pantries. 11 active volunteers currently support these weekly deliveries, with roughly 11 families receiving them at a time. Currently, we are partnering with San Andres Pantry in South Omaha and Kountze Commons to obtain food for these households. These two food pantries are graciously willing and able to box food for families that our volunteers then pick up. Families receiving deliveries are generally unable to visit the pantries themselves because they lack vehicles or reliable access to public transportation, or have physical limitations, necessitating that food be brought directly to them.
The existence of a food pantry does not necessarily mean that a family can access the food available there. Without reliable transportation, accessing food pantries becomes an incredible barrier. Restoring Dignity has not been able to identify a large Omaha-area pantry with a reliable delivery program capable of serving families at scale. The traditional food-pantry model generally assumes that clients have transportation and can travel to the pantry in person.
For newly arrived refugee households, elderly adults, people with disabilities, and families without vehicles, that assumption creates a significant problem. A food pantry may have food available, but if a family has no vehicle and cannot reasonably reach the pantry, that food is not functionally accessible to the household.
Refugee-serving organizations across Omaha are working together to address this transportation gap. Restoring Dignity regularly communicates with partner agencies that are also working to help families access available food resources. In some cases, agencies such as CIRA have their caseworkers personally driving families to nearby food pantries. Refugee Women Rising is also helping transport families who otherwise would not be able to access food. These efforts are critical, but they require substantial staff time and organizational resources.
Time spent transporting families to obtain groceries is time that caseworkers cannot spend addressing employment, housing, healthcare, immigration, financial stability, and the many other needs facing the same households.
Restoring Dignity does not have the staff capacity to routinely drive families to food pantries, so we have created a volunteer food-delivery system to bridge this gap. Staff coordinates food sources, pantry pickups, volunteers, delivery schedules, and individual households every week. While this system currently helps approximately 11 families receive weekly food deliveries, it is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. A volunteer-based delivery system that works for 11 households cannot realistically absorb the needs of hundreds of families. We are actively working to increase the capacity of our food delivery program by establishing more partnerships with food pantries that can pack food boxes for volunteers to pick up, but the process has been slow and difficult: many pantries are not able to adjust their systems to accommodate our families’ needs because they are already stretched too thin.
Additionally, the food that pantries can give out is often enough for one- or two-person households. From our experience in this sector over the past year, it appears that many food pantries are largely focused on serving the needs of the unhoused and smaller households. Previously, large refugee families needing complete food support had not been a community need, since SNAP was available. Now that SNAP has been cut to thousands of people in Omaha, food pantries are also in a bind. The population of people needing food has dramatically increased, but the resources have not. At this moment, it is nearly impossible for a large family to get enough food through pantries alone. The resources simply cannot support the need.
The response to this food crisis has become a community-wide effort involving refugee-serving organizations, caseworkers, food pantries, volunteers, donors, and other community partners. Organizations are doing everything possible to help families access food, but the solution increasingly depends upon nonprofit staff physically transporting families or volunteers delivering groceries to their homes. This is a substantial commitment of local resources simply to recreate access to food that families previously had through SNAP.
The level of organizational, volunteer, and charitable resources now required simply to keep vulnerable households fed is not sustainable as a long-term replacement for federal nutrition assistance.
Family educator, Melody, teaches a family about financial survivorship during our Pathways to Financial Stability Classes.
From Food Assistance to Family Stabilization
Feed-A-Family has necessarily evolved beyond grocery assistance. Each referral creates an opportunity to assess what else is happening within the household and intervene before food insecurity cascades into a larger crisis.
Restoring Dignity staff coordinate with other refugee-serving organizations to prevent duplication, connect families with available benefits and community resources, assist with employment needs, arrange access to food pantries and deliveries, and refer families requiring more intensive intervention to CIRA and LFS. To date, 24 Feed-A-Family referrals have already been transferred to CIRA and LFS for broader stabilization assistance, including households experiencing rent, utility, employment, or other significant needs.
The need for this type of coordination is directly tied to how the loss of SNAP affects the rest of a household budget. Grocery costs do not disappear when food assistance ends. Instead, those costs are transferred into an already constrained household budget, leaving less money available for rent, utilities, transportation, medications, childcare, hygiene products, and other basic necessities.
What begins as food insecurity can therefore quickly become housing instability, utility disconnection, health instability, or unemployment. Restoring Dignity’s goal is to intervene before families reach that point. To achieve this goal requires spending many hours with each family, and the casework is intensive. We have had to hire a full-time position for Feed A Family to manage the caseload, and will need to hire more assistance soon, as cases continue to increase. The hiring of additional staff also places a financial strain on Restoring Dignity, as we must raise additional funds to cover the costs of those positions.
Restoring Dignity Family Educator, Thierry, finishes a class with a new arrival refugee mom and her baby. While times are incredibly difficult for these families, there is great pride in the accomplishment of graduating from an intensive financial survivorship class!
Pathways to Financial Stability: How to Survive When There Isn’t Enough to Survive On
Direct financial assistance cannot possibly meet the scale of the need. Restoring Dignity has identified more than 590 families, representing approximately 3,000 individuals, within our own existing client population who do not yet have green cards and are vulnerable to the SNAP eligibility changes.
Based on our current resources, we estimate that only about 10% of those families can realistically receive Feed-A-Family assistance over the lifetime of the program (which we assume will be another two years, given that federal law may change in the future). This leaves hundreds of families whom we know are affected but whom we simply do not have sufficient financial resources to support with grocery assistance.
Because direct financial assistance cannot scale to meet this need, Restoring Dignity developed another intervention. We developed a 233-page financial curriculum called Pathways to Financial Stability. We created a website called Dignity Learning, and this new curriculum is housed there, available for anyone, anywhere to use and modify for their community’s needs. Our curriculum is taught in family homes across 3 classes, totaling 7 hours of instruction, and usually wraps up after 6 weeks. Our 12 multilingual Family Educators are teaching Pathways to Financial Stability as quickly as organizational capacity allows, prioritizing families affected by the loss of SNAP.
Family Educator Chit Thel Oo assists a client during class.
The Pathways to Financial Stability curriculum was developed after families began losing food assistance. Its purpose is to help households restructure budgets, prioritize essential expenses, identify opportunities to increase income or reduce costs, locate community food and other resources, and make financial decisions that protect housing stability. Classes are delivered in families’ preferred languages and are designed to be accessible to participants with limited literacy or formal education.
Pathways to Financial Stability is an important intervention, but it also has a clear limitation. Financial education cannot replace income that does not exist. Families can learn how to budget differently, access food pantries, seek additional employment, reduce expenses, and identify available resources, but there is a point at which a household simply does not have enough income to cover food, housing, utilities, transportation, childcare, healthcare, and other necessities.
The classes give families tools to survive an increasingly difficult financial reality, but they cannot replace the hundreds of dollars in monthly food assistance that very vulnerable families have lost.
Volunteer and Hygiene Manager, Brook, stands with a box of hygiene products that will go out to a family.
The Impact Extends Beyond Food: Restoring Wellbeing Hygiene Pantry
Restoring Dignity opened the Restoring Wellbeing Hygiene Pantry in September 2026 as another direct response to what our staff observed: families who lost SNAP and could no longer afford groceries could no longer afford hygiene items either. The pantry provides essential hygiene and household products so families do not have to divert additional income away from groceries, rent, and utilities.
Our partner agency, CIRA, picks up hygiene boxes to be distributed to refugee clients who have lost SNAP and Medicaid.
Like Feed-A-Family, the Hygiene Pantry is supported entirely through community donations. In our first month of operating, we have distributed 119 hygiene boxes that have reached 520 people. About half of those boxes have gone to our clients, and the other half have been distributed to local refugee organizations, who are getting the boxes out to their impacted clients. We are currently providing boxes to: African Immigrant Family Services, Refugee Women Rising, Nebraska Afghan Community Center and the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement.
Learning how to take public transportation to food pantries during our Pathways to Financial Stability classes.
A Growing Gap That Charitable Assistance Alone Cannot Fill
Restoring Dignity is effectively operating a triage system. At any given time, our financial resources only allow us to provide intensive grocery assistance to approximately 20–30 families, representing roughly 100–150 people. Eligibility is therefore intentionally restricted to households facing the most severe circumstances, particularly those for whom the loss of food assistance could directly threaten housing stability.
We are assisting elderly adults who cannot simply increase their income, people with significant disabilities, single-parent households, and families in which the loss of food assistance means money previously needed for rent or utilities must now be used to purchase groceries.
Meanwhile, Restoring Dignity has identified 590+ families within our own client population who are vulnerable to SNAP eligibility changes. Approximately 90% cannot realistically receive ongoing Feed-A-Family assistance with our current resources, regardless of the financial impact the loss of the benefit is having on their households.
For those families, Restoring Dignity is working to provide Pathways to Financial Stability education, resource navigation, food pantry connections, employment support, and other resources. However, nonprofit programs, charitable donations, food pantries, and financial education cannot replicate the scale of assistance previously provided through SNAP.
What began as an emergency food response has therefore become a broader family-stabilization effort involving grocery assistance, food delivery, hygiene supplies, financial education, benefits navigation, employment support, referrals, volunteer coordination, and cross-agency case management. All of these interventions are being used in an effort to prevent the loss of food assistance from cascading into homelessness, utility shutoffs, deteriorating health, and deeper poverty.
The loss of Medicaid, which took effect on October 1st, 2026 (and Medicare on January 4th, 2027), for many of these same households is further deepening this instability. Food insecurity, healthcare insecurity, and housing insecurity do not occur independently of one another. For a family already living with very little financial margin, each additional loss increases the likelihood of another crisis.
Families living on the streets of Omaha
Restoring Dignity’s greatest concern is that these families will ultimately become unhoused. When a household is already living at the financial margin, it is nearly impossible to absorb the loss of hundreds of dollars in food assistance every month. Food cannot be eliminated, and neither can rent. Eventually, something has to give.
We do not want elderly or disabled refugees becoming homeless because they cannot work enough hours to replace their food benefits. We do not want parents choosing between feeding their children and paying their rent. We do not want families who escaped war and displacement experiencing another form of instability after rebuilding their lives in Omaha. Most importantly, we do not want families and children living on the streets of Omaha because there wasn’t enough money and resources for the charitable sector to replace a federal nutrition program.
Restoring Dignity is doing everything within our capacity to prevent that outcome. However, there is a limit to what community donations, volunteers, food pantries, and nonprofit organizations can absorb.
The more than 590 families Restoring Dignity has already identified are not theoretical. They are families our Family Educators know personally. We sit inside their homes. We know their children. We know what they earn, what resources they have available, and what they are losing.
Despite everything Restoring Dignity, food pantries, volunteers, donors, and other community organizations are doing, we cannot replace SNAP at this scale.
That is the reality we are seeing on the ground in Omaha, one year after SNAP was cut.
And the only fix lies in the hands of our U.S. Congress, Senate, and President, who need to be working together to rescind the harmful parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Until then, we will continue operating in this new reality that is substantially harming the most vulnerable people in Omaha.
A Deeper Dive…
Why the Loss of SNAP Is So Significant
SNAP is specifically intended to reduce food insecurity among households with very limited incomes. Families do not receive SNAP simply because they are refugees; they must meet financial and other program eligibility requirements. The households affected by these changes were already living with incomes low enough to qualify for federal nutrition assistance.
Restoring Dignity’s Feed-A-Family data illustrates the size of the financial gap these households are now expected to absorb. Among families currently enrolled in Feed-A-Family, the average monthly need is $843.30. If a family had to replace that level of food assistance for an entire year, it would amount to nearly $10,119 in additional annual food costs.
For a household already struggling to afford rent, utilities, transportation, childcare, medical needs, hygiene products, and other necessities, there is no realistic way to simply absorb over $900 in additional monthly grocery expenses. The cost of food does not disappear when SNAP disappears. Instead, families are forced to shift money away from other basic needs in order to continue purchasing groceries. Additionally, families cannot replace all lost SNAP with food pantry items. Food pantries are limited themselves in what they can give to families. For example, if a family of 11 were to visit a food pantry, the pantry would likely only be able to provide enough food for one day. Many pantries only allow people to visit once a month, with only a few offering weekly visits.
This is why the loss of SNAP is not only a food-security issue. It is also a housing-stability issue. When a household begins using money previously budgeted for rent, utilities, transportation, or medication to purchase food, one crisis can quickly create another. For the most financially vulnerable families Restoring Dignity serves, the loss of food assistance creates a significant and very real risk of homelessness.
The consequences of these changes are already visible within families Restoring Dignity serves.
One Afghan family that is enrolled in our Feed-A-Family program provides a particularly difficult example. The father served alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan and is now seriously ill and unable to work. His wife is working while also carrying the responsibility of caring for her husband and the rest of the household. Even with her income, the family was already financially vulnerable before losing SNAP. After their food assistance ended, the family could no longer make the household budget work. Their 17-year-old son has now dropped out of high school to work full-time and help provide for the family. Instead of completing his education, their teenager is helping replace income that disappeared when his family lost federal food assistance.
This is the type of long-term consequence Restoring Dignity is increasingly concerned about. The immediate issue may be food insecurity, but the effects can extend into education, employment, family caregiving, housing stability, and the future economic mobility of children.
A newly arrived refugee family learns how to shrink their already meager budget to afford rent, utilities, and food.
The Families Affected Are Still Rebuilding Their Lives in the United States
The circumstances of the families affected by these changes are important. Only legally present refugees and immigrants without green cards are impacted. This is code for “new arrivals.” These are families who were admitted to the USA under federal programs over the past few years. Among those losing assistance in Omaha are Afghan families, including people who worked alongside or supported U.S. forces and the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, as well as Ukrainian families displaced by war. Nebraska Public Media has specifically documented these populations among the Omaha families affected by the SNAP changes.
These families arrived in the United States after experiencing war, persecution, displacement, or genocide. All came without savings, established credit, reliable transportation, professional networks, or the other financial assets that help a household withstand a sudden loss of hundreds of dollars in monthly assistance. Many are simultaneously learning English, adapting to a new employment system, establishing credit, and navigating unfamiliar schools and healthcare systems.
Economic stability for a newly arrived family also takes time. Getting a first job is not the same as achieving financial self-sufficiency. Families must improve English proficiency, establish employment histories, learn unfamiliar financial systems, obtain childcare, build credit, accumulate savings, and often work toward purchasing a vehicle before they can access better-paying employment.
Transportation is particularly significant in Omaha. Reliable transportation can determine which jobs an individual can accept, what work shifts are possible, and whether they can reach appointments and community resources. Yet purchasing and maintaining a reliable vehicle requires savings that many newly arrived families simply do not have. For families starting over after displacement, it can take years to build enough financial stability to purchase and maintain a vehicle.
SNAP has therefore functioned as an important stabilizing resource during the years when families are rebuilding. It allows limited household income to remain available for rent, utilities, transportation, childcare, and other necessities while families gradually move toward greater economic independence. In many cases, SNAP has not prevented self-sufficiency; it has helped families remain stable long enough to achieve it.
A hygiene pantry donation drop off.
Federal Green Card Processing Holds Deepen the Crisis
It is important to understand that refugees do not immediately receive green cards upon arrival. Federal law requires a refugee to be physically present in the United States for at least one year before adjusting to lawful permanent resident status to receive a green card. Processing then requires a federal immigration application and adjudication, meaning families can remain without green cards for a considerable period even while lawfully present and following the immigration process available to them. As of August 2026, the average processing time for a green card is 30.5 months. This process has never been an issue for the decades that America has brought and welcomed refugees to our shores. It was not until the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 that SNAP eligibility was suddenly tied to having a green card.
This new law makes the SNAP eligibility changes particularly consequential. Families may be lawfully admitted to the United States by complying with the immigration process, working, paying taxes, paying rent, and raising children in Omaha, yet still be unable to meet the immigration-status requirement now tied to SNAP eligibility. Many of the families affected are simply caught between their lawful arrival in the United States and the point at which the federal government grants them permanent resident status.
To complicate the situation further, the federal government paused the processing of green card applications to refugees and immigrants from 39 countries in late 2025. Every refugee family we serve is from a country on that list. This means that even after following every law possible and doing all the right things, legally present refugee families are now being punished by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which ties SNAP and Medicaid eligibility to having a green card. Families are being told that access to basic food and healthcare assistance depends on holding a green card, while the federal government has simultaneously delayed or paused the process for obtaining one. For many Restoring Dignity families, this is not a failure to follow the law. They are being harmed while doing exactly what the law requires.
Recently, a federal judge ruled that green card applications from the list of 39 countries must begin being processed. However, the federal government has appealed that ruling, so the legal situation remains unsettled.
Volunteers laminate and put together financial materials in 14 languages for families taking our Pathways to Financial Stability classes. Without volunteers, we would not be able to run our programs.
Loss of Work Authorization Is Creating Another Path Into Food Insecurity
The loss of SNAP is not the only federal policy change pushing refugee and humanitarian households into crisis. Restoring Dignity is also serving families who were previously working and supporting themselves but are now unable to legally work because their employment authorization has expired, their humanitarian status has ended, or their renewal applications remain caught in federal processing delays.
This problem affects several different humanitarian populations. Ukrainians who entered through the Uniting for Ukraine program have faced lengthy delays in humanitarian re-parole and employment authorization applications. In March 2026, members of Congress wrote to USCIS warning that these delays were resulting in “lapses in work authorization and the loss of lawful presence through no fault of their own.” Some applications had been pending for more than a year. Ukrainians are not alone.
Afghan families have experienced similar instability through a combination of humanitarian parole, employment authorization, and Temporary Protected Status changes. More than 70,000 Afghans were admitted to the United States on temporary parole following the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, including many people who assisted the U.S. government and military. The federal government later terminated Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Afghans, a designation that had allowed eligible individuals to remain in the United States and work legally. Federal immigration processing for Afghans has also been repeatedly disrupted, adding another layer of uncertainty for families trying to maintain lawful status and employment.
Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is another important part of this picture. TPS allows people from countries experiencing war, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions to remain and work legally in the United States for a designated period. Over the past two years, the federal government has moved to terminate or restrict TPS for numerous countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Myanmar (Burma), South Sudan, Ethiopia, and others. The result for affected households can be the loss of employment authorization even when a person has lived and worked legally in the United States for years.
For families, the practical consequences are severe. These are often households that were working and supporting themselves before their immigration documents expired or federal policies changed. Once employment authorization is lost, the family’s income disappears almost immediately. Rent, utilities, car payments, insurance, and grocery bills continue, but the adults in the household may no longer legally be able to earn enough to pay them.
Restoring Dignity currently has several families in Feed-A-Family experiencing this situation. In one household, the family’s employment authorization has expired, and they have been unable to renew it due to changes and delays in federal immigration processing. The family had recently purchased a vehicle, an important step toward greater employment and financial stability. After losing their ability to work, they sold the vehicle to pay their rent. That decision kept the family housed for another month, but they do not know how they will pay rent the following month.
This is an important distinction in understanding the current food crisis. Some families Restoring Dignity serves are working but have lost SNAP. Others have lost the legal ability to work and therefore no longer have the income needed to purchase food. Some families are experiencing both at the same time. Families who had been moving toward self-sufficiency are now selling vehicles, draining what savings they may have, and relying on food pantries and charitable assistance simply to remain housed and fed.
The impact is also being documented by other Omaha organizations. Amanda Hall, Founder and Executive Director of Orel Alliance, reports that Ukrainian families in Nebraska and western Iowa are experiencing significant gaps in employment authorization, with some waiting more than a year for work permits. She notes that these delays are affecting not only Ukrainian families but also their American employers, landlords and local economies. Orel Alliance has provided more than $1 million in direct financial assistance and supports approximately 2,500 Ukrainians in Nebraska and western Iowa.
These situations illustrate a larger concern Restoring Dignity is seeing across refugee and humanitarian communities. Families who entered the United States legally, obtained permission to work, found employment, and began rebuilding their lives are now losing their ability to support themselves due to policy changes, the expiration of temporary protections, or federal processing delays beyond their control. When those same households are also losing access to SNAP and other public benefits, there is very little left between a previously stable family and a housing crisis.
The result is that charitable organizations are increasingly being asked to replace not only lost public benefits, but also lost earned income. That is a much larger gap than food pantries, grocery gift cards, and emergency assistance were ever designed to fill.
Volunteers pack hygiene boxes for families impacted by SNAP and Medicaid cuts.
The Broader Impact on Omaha
The impact of these policy changes extends beyond individual refugee households. Refugee and immigrant communities are deeply woven into Omaha’s workforce, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and economy.
Foreign-born workers make substantial contributions to industries important to Nebraska’s economy, including construction, food services, and animal slaughter and processing. A University of Nebraska Omaha economic study found that foreign-born employment in the Omaha metropolitan area generated billions of dollars in economic production and supported tens of thousands of jobs.
Refugee and immigrant families have also created restaurants, grocery stores, and other small businesses throughout Omaha. In many ‘food desert’ neighborhoods, ethnic grocery stores serve an especially important function by providing fresh ingredients and convenient food access for households that may have limited transportation.
The loss of SNAP therefore has an economic impact beyond the household receiving the benefit. When thousands of low-income individuals suddenly lose hundreds of dollars in monthly grocery purchasing power, those dollars also disappear from the businesses where SNAP benefits were previously spent. This significantly increases the risk of more of Omaha becoming a ‘food desert’ because ethnic grocery stores will likely close over time.
The same dynamic can be seen throughout Omaha’s nonprofit and charitable systems. Families still need food. When SNAP no longer meets that need, families turn to food pantries, churches, and nonprofit organizations. Those organizations then need additional staff, volunteers, transportation, storage, funding, and supplies in order to respond.
The need has not disappeared. It has simply been shifted from a federal nutrition program onto households and local communities.
This illustrates an important secondary consequence of the SNAP changes: the cost of meeting these families’ basic needs has not disappeared; it has been redistributed. Families are absorbing the cost by cutting household spending. Nonprofits are absorbing the cost through expanded programs and additional staff capacity. Volunteers are absorbing the cost through their time, transportation, and personal vehicles. Food pantries are absorbing increased demand. Local residents are absorbing the cost through charitable donations. Cutting SNAP for legally present refugees and humanitarian populations has simply shifted the federal government’s fiscal responsibilty onto local cities, families, and nonprofits. The difference is that local entities do not have even a fraction of the financial means the federal government has.
CHI Health conducted a system-wide hygiene drive and provided many items for families in need!
Omaha Has a Long History of Welcoming Refugee Families
Omaha has spent decades welcoming refugee families who have rebuilt their lives in this community. Our city currently is home to over 60,000 people who were brought to the USA as refugees via the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Over time, refugee families have become workers, homeowners, taxpayers, business owners, parents, neighbors, and community leaders. They contribute to Omaha’s schools, neighborhoods, industries, churches, and local economy.
The families Restoring Dignity is most concerned about today are often simply at an earlier point in that same process. Many are new arrivals who are still learning English, building credit, establishing employment histories, saving for transportation, and recovering financially from displacement.
This context matters because the current SNAP crisis is affecting families during one of the most financially vulnerable periods of resettlement. These families are being asked to become fully self-sufficient while they are still building the basic infrastructure necessary to achieve that stability.
SNAP has historically served as one of the supports that allowed families to remain housed and fed during this transition. Removing food assistance before a household has accumulated the income, savings, transportation, and other resources necessary to replace it creates instability at exactly the point when families are most vulnerable.
Omaha has invested decades in building a community where refugees have been able to rebuild their lives and contribute to the city. Allowing newly arrived families to fall into severe food insecurity or homelessness undermines that investment and creates additional costs and instability for the broader community.
