A federal judge in Rhode Island on Thursday ordered the Trump Administration to fully fund nationwide SNAP benefits for the month of November.
The Trump administration immediately appealed that order and earlier court decisions that required it to make at least partial payments to the SNAP program.
The order issued Thursday requires that full funding be delivered to states no later than Friday, Nov. 7, from additional money held in reserve by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr.'s decision comes after a coalition of cities and nonprofit groups argued that a proposal to partially fund SNAP payments was insufficient.
The judge on Thursday agreed, saying the government had acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" when it chose to only partially fund SNAP in November.
“The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP,” he wrote in the order. “They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial Snap payments and failed to consider the harms individual who rely on those benefits would suffer.”
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President Donald Trump and his administration sent mixed signals all week about whether SNAP would be paid.
Court rulings at the end of October said that SNAP payments could not be suspended.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump said benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt then said the president was referring to future payments, not the ones currently being processed.
And in an interview with Scripps News, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that the program does not have funds available to extend benefits past November.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.