The ongoing deportation sweeps that first rocked Orange County this summer are not stopping efforts to feed the county’s most vulnerable residents with local nonprofits warning that the dual impact of expected federal funding cuts will worsen the region’s food insecurity cliff.
The sweeps are leaving many undocumented families scared to go to work or grocery shopping and risk being separated from their loved ones as hunger continues to affect seniors, children and working class families.
The need for free food in OC that skyrocketed amid government-mandated shutdowns and layoffs years ago due to a global pandemic has remained high, kept elevated by expensive inflation costs and an abrupt loss of public COVID-19 food assistance benefits.
[Read: Hunger is on a Sharp and Silent Rise in Orange County This Thanksgiving]
Amid the elevated demand, Orange County’s network of food pantries are once again adapting their models to help poor families navigate the latest hurdle impacting people’s ability to get food in Orange County.
Mark Lowry, OC Food Bank Director, said expected cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known in California as the CalFresh food stamp program, would be devastating for Orange County.
“We do worry that there’s less food coming from the federal government, which is the primary supplier of food for vulnerable families in the country,” Lowry said.
“The SNAP program, as an example, provides so much more food than the food banks do, that we can never fill that hole.”
He also said when the federal immigration raids started up in June food pantries leaders and school districts were asking him what they do now that people are afraid to show up to the traditional food distributions.
“People saw almost an immediate decrease in people’s willingness to come out and go to a public food distribution that could be a target for immigration enforcement,” Lowry said, adding that many groups have shifted to delivering food to the needy.
At the same time, more grass roots and hyper localized efforts to feed and support people are taking shape as groups of people are buying groceries and delivering them to their immigrant neighbors.
[Read: ICE Raids Spur Aid Network in Orange County]
Tanya Navarro, a Santa Ana resident, said she started the OC Rapid Response Network’s grocery program after the raids ramped up in June because people started to sacrifice basic necessities like doctor visits and grocery shopping to avoid the risk of deportation.
“We wanted to make sure to connect those who are directly impacted with a way to feel not only supported by the community, but to have an opportunity to eat and to get a little bit of relief,” she said in a phone interview.
Since June, the program has done over 70 deliveries across Orange County not including the deliveries to day laborers and car wash workers – two groups have been heavily targeted by the raids.
The effort is being funded by different mutual aid groups and community organizations and donations from residents.
Navarro said the shock and grief felt by residents in the wake of the June 9 deportation sweeps is what has fueled many of the grass root delivery efforts to feed families.
“Immigrants were dehumanized and brutalized and violently abused, taken and kidnapped and jailed,” she said.
“It became a very personal and emotional response to say, ‘No, I will resist against this narrative that they deserve any of that treatment, and we will humanize them and make sure to step up.’”
Navarro adds that they ask families what they need from the store and it’s not always limited to food – sometimes they go out and get shoes, toiletries and school supplies for families.
“We don’t decide what people need for them, and we make sure that it’s very much led by the people that we’re attempting to support,” she said.
It’s not just community led efforts.
Officials in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa have also allocated hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to financially support immigrants impacted by the deportation sweeps.
Navarro said more cities across Orange County need to follow their lead.
“Every single city should do its part in making sure you know residents are able to survive during this time of political violence – of ICE actively seeking out and violently deporting people,” she said.
Meanwhile, pantries like the ones held by the Seva Collective in Santa Ana for the past five years are also branching out to do deliveries and making their walk-up and drive-through distributions less visible from the street.
“Food is a basic human need. It’s not a luxury item. It’s something that everyone needs to survive,” said Bandana Singh, the pantry’s leader, in a phone interview.
“We know that a lot of our recipient families rely on the food that we give so we wanted to do our best to ensure that this basic human need was somehow still received by the people who need it most.”
Singh said since the crackdowns the people who come and get food from their pantry have changed.
“Younger people, children who do feel safe enough to come out, have been coming to the pantry to get food for their parents,” she said. “They’ve been able to come and assist their family in that way and so it’s been really beautiful to see the community coming together to help those in need.”
Hilda Ortiz, director of capacity building and leadership development for Latino Health Access, said their organization is also seeing younger people come to their weekly food distributions and are branching out into deliveries – thanks to an influx of volunteers.
She also said they have made their onsite distributions less visible from the street.
“The immigration situation we’re in right now has contributed overall to the fear, but the need continues to be there,” Ortiz said in a phone interview.
“It’s important to make sure that the families, for whatever reason, they’re not able to make it, that that need is being met, so that they have food on the table.”
Lowry said he hopes that pantries won’t have to switch permanently to deliveries but ICE is receiving more funding.
“Their funding suggests that the ICE will be well resourced to be able to be pretty aggressive in terms of immigration enforcement,” he said.
“We certainly hope that it’s not necessary that the only safe way for vulnerable families to receive food is for somebody to figure out how to deliver it, but it’s certainly a possibility.”
How Could Federal Funding Cuts Impact Food Insecurity in OC?
The immigration sweeps are taking place as food banks and pantries across the state worry about severe cuts to CalFresh under H.R. 1 – a congressional bill dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“This legislation breaks with decades of federal commitment by shifting billions in costs to states and reducing food assistance for millions of families,” reads the California Association of Food Banks website.
According to the California Budget & Policy center, more than 750,000 people in California could lose their food benefits under the bill with the state losing between $2.5 to $4.5 billion annually in federal funding.
Tomorrow, the CalFresh Healthy Living program aimed at educating recipients about nutrition is being eliminated – a loss of about $180 million annually in federal funding.
It comes as local food bank leaders and social services officials have been working to increase enrollment in the CalFresh program in recent years to help address hunger needs in Orange County.
Now, Lowry says there has been a decrease in the number of people on CalFresh in OC amid efforts to push back against the cuts expected in the next couple of years.
“These are huge, huge cuts and and we will do everything and be as creative as we can but this is a situation where failure isn’t an option,” he said.
Georgina Maldonado, executive director of the Community Health Initiative of Orange County, said the big beautiful bill is chipping away at their ability to make healthcare and food benefits more accessible in OC.
“We know that funding in the very near future will be cut, at least for us as an agency. We are aware that other organizations are already feeling the hit on what we call, at a national level, the SNAP program,” Maldonado said.
She also said the initiative – which helps enroll people into Medi-Cal and CalFresh food stamp benefits – is bracing for the impacts of the cuts and that less people are showing up to their office for help.
So they’re helping people enroll for the programs over the phone.
Maldonado adds that while undocumented residents aren’t eligible for CalFresh food benefits they would apply for the assistance on behalf of their kids.
Refugees, asylum seekers and human trafficking survivors are eligible for the benefits but that is expected to change under the bill – leaving 74,000 noncitizens in California without access to food assistance.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.