USDA gave states one calendar day. On Oct. 31, 2025, the agency issued guidance telling states how to remove certain lawful permanent residents from SNAP rolls; the compliance deadline attached to it was Nov. 1, 2025. A federal judge in Oregon has now ruled that timeline, and the fines the administration threatened over it, permanently unlawful.
The ruling closes out a case that has run since a coalition of state attorneys general sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture in November 2025. It converts a preliminary injunction issued that December into a permanent one, and it goes further than blocking the deadline alone.
What the one-day deadline was supposed to do
The guidance at issue targeted a specific group: lawful permanent residents who came to the United States as refugees, asylees or other humanitarian immigrants. Federal law normally exempts that group from SNAP’s five-year waiting period for noncitizens, but USDA’s Oct. 31 guidance told states to stop treating the exemption as automatic, with barely a day to adjust before the Nov. 1 deadline took hold, according to reporting on the case timeline by Delaware Live. States that missed the mark faced financial penalties USDA had attached to the same guidance.
A ruling that doesn’t reset a renewal clock: Permanently blocking a penalty on states says nothing about the recertification paperwork an individual SNAP case still owes, on its own schedule, regardless of who wins in court. The renewal document checklist in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer tracks that separate paperwork.
Judge Kasubhai’s Sept. 17 ruling blocks both the fines and the guidance
U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai of the District of Oregon issued the permanent ruling, according to Courthouse News‘s account of the opinion. Oregon’s attorney general’s office said the judge “sided with Oregon and the coalition on every claim, striking down both the administration’s fine-triggering deadline and its guidance restricting food assistance for lawful permanent residents.” In the opinion itself, Kasubhai wrote that USDA “placed plaintiffs in an impossible situation to timely implement” the law’s SNAP changes “though contradictory, absent, and misleading messaging.”
22 jurisdictions are covered by the order
The Washington attorney general’s office, one of the plaintiffs, named all 22 members of the coalition the ruling protects, made up of 21 states plus the District of Columbia: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin, along with Washington, D.C. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and New York’s office led the group when it first sued in November 2025.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said the decision “protects critical food benefits for people who are lawfully in this country and stops the government’s illegal attempts to penalize states that support them.” Rayfield, in his own statement, called the guidance part of a pattern: “Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, we’ve all watched his administration play games with emergency food assistance. This is about parents’ ability to feed their kids, and partisan politics shouldn’t have any part in it.”
Why the ruling reaches beyond the deadline itself
Kasubhai’s order did not stop at striking the one-day compliance window. It made permanent the broader finding that USDA’s guidance on lawful permanent residents was unlawful in the first place, meaning the fine-triggering deadline was never enforceable to begin with, regardless of how much notice states got. That combination — voiding both the underlying eligibility guidance and the penalty mechanism built on top of it — is what the Washington attorney general’s office described as blocking the fines and going further than the earlier preliminary injunction.
The ruling leaves the standard SNAP rule intact: lawful permanent residents who arrived as refugees, asylees or other humanitarian immigrants remain exempt from the program’s five-year waiting period, exactly as Oregon’s release describes the law that USDA’s guidance had tried to override.
What the case does not decide
A permanent injunction against USDA does not automatically restore any individual case that a state may have already closed under the disputed guidance between November 2025 and this month. The ruling stops the federal penalty structure and voids the guidance going forward; it does not itself function as a claims process for a household whose SNAP case changed in the meantime. States within the 22-jurisdiction coalition are the parties positioned to act on the order, since they were the plaintiffs the court ruled in favor of, not individual SNAP recipients filing on their own behalf.
The decision also does not extend to states outside the coalition, which sued separately or not at all. A lawful permanent resident’s SNAP status in a state that was not one of the 22 plaintiffs is governed by whatever guidance USDA maintains for that state, unless a similar legal challenge produces its own ruling there.
A Court Win That Leaves a State’s Own Paperwork Standing
A permanent ruling against USDA’s penalties changes what the federal government can do to a state. It does not change what a state’s own SNAP office asks of an individual household at recertification, a process this ruling never addressed.
The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer opens with a renewal document checklist and a renewal and reporting calendar for keeping track of that separate, ongoing requirement.
See the renewal document checklist in The SNAP & Medicaid Renewal Organizer.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources.
