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In late 2025, conservative internet personality Nick Shirley—seizing an opportunity to go viral—made perfunctory surprise visits to day care centers in Minnesota to accuse them of fraud. The claims in his videos were easily debunked, but their veracity was not the point. The Trump administration’s attacks on Somali Minnesotans had been escalating for months, and it used Shirley’s videos to bootstrap another escalation of its campaign against the state. Citing his already debunked claims, the Trump administration escalated “Operation Metro Surge” in early January, sending 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services cut off the Federal Child Care and Development Fund’s childcare subsidy payments as well as Temporary Aid to Needy Families payments to Minnesota. And the Department of Homeland Security dispatched agents to conduct raids on day care centers in Minnesota, seeking to build fraud cases against their staff.
This assault on Minnesota illustrates how comprehensively the welfare state has been used as a tool of repression and deportation under the Trump administration. While welfare has historically offered the poor both relief and repression, the balance of the two functions has varied over time. Welfare has also shifted across what Cybelle Fox called three worlds of relief: European descendant white Americans experienced a relatively generous welfare state; Black Americans were excluded from its benefits or policed through its programs; and nonwhite immigrants found that seeking relief through welfare programs exposed them to the threat of deportation. These functions, as Dorothy Roberts has written, are also about delineating and defining citizenship. Secure and dignified welfare programs enhance people’s ability to act as citizens, but precarious and repressively run programs degrade that citizenship, and exclusionary ones deepen the denial of personhood that is currently attached to lack of citizenship.
Today, as the Minnesota case shows, the welfare state is being turned into an instrument of mass deportation. At the national level, the safety net’s administrative records are being leveraged against its beneficiaries. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are giving data on Medicaid and public housing beneficiaries to ICE to be used to identify deportable persons.
Meanwhile, the specter of welfare usage is being used to bar the door to citizenship. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is using the public charge rule—which allows immigration denials based on presumed future reliance on welfare—to further restrict the naturalization of immigrants. HUD is also working on increasing its restrictions on eligibility, from a ban on most immigrants to a ban on entire families if even one member is a noncitizen.
At the state level, the manufactured welfare fraud scandal used in Minnesota can now be deployed against any state to legitimize federal ICE invasions. And the administration is well-practiced in weaponizing its control of the flow of federal funds, blocking congressionally appropriated streams of social safety net funding as punishment for insufficient cooperation with the administration’s priorities. Meanwhile, HUD is creating public propaganda urging public housing residents to turn in their immigrant neighbors. Its raid on a Chicago apartment building targeted Venezuelan migrants housed through a state-funded assistance program.
What connects these policies is a weaponization of welfare itself: specifically, that contact with any part of the nation’s sprawling social safety net brings with it liability to deportation, echoing and exacerbating the Depression-era history of welfare officers deporting Mexican immigrants and citizens alike. Although the intervening decades have seen a steady increase in punitive and xenophobic policy, the central moment in the welfare state’s transformation into an infrastructure of repression and exclusion came in 1996: the year we supposedly ended welfare as we knew it.
The ’90s as a Turning Point in the History of Welfare
Thirty years ago, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton. The bill effectively ended the New Deal’s classic welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The government slashed cash support to poor families, imposed work requirements and time limits on recipients, narrowed eligibility for both citizens and immigrants, and dramatically increased the policing of welfare programs. What was left of the program was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. But TANF serves as little more than an alibi, as its meager funding reaches only 21 percent of eligible households.
PRWORA might have been the most visceral moment in which the nation slashed its safety net. Yet it was only one part of a broader, bipartisan abandonment of the New Deal and embrace of neoliberal forms of support for the poor.1
Take public housing as a parallel case. In 1992, through what was called the HOPE VI program, Congress began demolishing and only partially replacing 100,000 units of public housing. And by 1998, it placed a symbolic last nail in the program’s coffin by passing the Faircloth Amendment, which banned public housing agencies from building any more units of public housing than they already had. Consolidating the parallels in these two programs’ trajectories, HUD Secretary of Housing Henry Cisneros crowed that his office was also “ending public housing as we know it.”2
These transformations flew in the face of what public housing tenant organizations and the welfare rights movement wanted. The subordination of popular will to a neoliberal agenda was deeply antidemocratic. Yet there is another important parallel in the fates of public housing and AFDC: their increased transformation into vehicles for the criminalization of the poor and the exclusion of immigrants, while leaving programs with majority white support—like Social Security and Medicare—largely untouched. In this way, reform accelerated the construction of the more carceral, repressive, and unequal welfare state we see today.
As we see the welfare state turned against the welfare of poor people in this country, it’s clear that its future is inextricable from the broader trajectory of the country.
The Carceral Welfare State
First, both public housing and AFDC changed to further exclude and criminalize the poor, effectively merging the welfare and carceral systems. Consider how PRWORA weaponized the welfare state in various ways: disqualifying people from welfare and food stamps if they had violated probation or parole; permanently banning assistance to those with prior felony drug convictions; and empowering Operation Talon, in which social service programs participated in sting operations by luring individuals with arrest warrants to come to welfare offices, where they would be arrested by waiting police. The same year he signed PRWORA, Clinton also signed into law the Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act. This act’s “one-strike eviction rule” mandated the eviction of public housing tenants if anyone even marginally associated with their unit was merely accused of a crime.
Across the safety net, then, the 1990s saw the emergence of forms of surveillance, criminalization, and exclusion. And these same weaponized elements of welfare have continued to grow into our present.
The Exclusionary Welfare State
Second, welfare reform also furthered the safety net’s exclusion of migrants. For example, for the first five years after immigrants began the legal immigration process, PRWORA denied them access to TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid. The law also restricted public housing assistance to only legal permanent residents and those with asylum or refugee status, part of a long-term effort to exclude immigrants from public housing that barred them from eligibility for public housing.
The result of these policies and practices, including the fear they induce, is that substantial fractions of green-card holders, mixed-status families, and children of immigrants avoid safety net programs to which they are legally entitled.
The Anti-State Welfare State
Third, the welfare state has transformed along the lines of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore termed the “anti-state state.” This is when the government is run by those who disavow its very function, and who, while claiming to dismantle the state, end up building up its punitive capacities.
Just as Cybelle Fox traced the relatively positive experience of welfare for European descendant whites in the early 1900s, today’s welfare state continues to benefit those in socially advantaged positions: Social Security and Medicare remain relatively unbothered by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the policing of the welfare state has been further broadened to incorporate the public.
In Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, I traced how cities deputized their residents into participating in the surveillance, policing, and eviction of neighbors who were renting their homes through the Section 8 housing voucher program. This has proved to be a common practice across our social landscape. We can see it in the landlord who calls ICE on his tenants, the YouTuber who sees fraud accusations as a ticket to increased viewership, or the parent induced to police their schools’ teachers for banned educational content in Florida. These trends are encouraged by the government, for example through the HUD’s meme encouraging Americans to “report illegals in public housing.”
The participatory nature of contemporary policing is helpful context for understanding the administration’s large-scale hiring of ICE officers: it is effectively a jobs program for a downwardly mobile neoliberal society, a Civilian Conservation Corps for the era of mass deportation. Beyond their material benefits, however, these opportunities are turning participation in policing into an avenue for social power and status, delivering what Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America described as a psychological wage.
Conclusion
Ten years ago, during the 20th anniversary of welfare reform, journalist Caitlin Esch interviewed a West Virginia family that had once received welfare. A decade after welfare reform took away that support, the family had turned to selling blood plasma to survive.
Today, there’s little reason to expect that such families’ circumstances have improved: TANF funds have further eroded due to inflation, while pandemic-era boosts to the safety net—which temporarily cut child poverty in half—were allowed to expire. Further cuts to Medicaid loom in 2027.
In this way, it turns out that as much as policymakers crowed that they were “ending welfare as we knew it,” they proved incapable of knowing the poor in any other way. Having destroyed much of the social safety net to eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse of the mythical “welfare queen,” a stereotype built entirely upon racism and sexism, they continue to govern the program through the presumption that its beneficiaries are un-deserving of aid. Without that presumption, Shirley’s video of Minneapolis could not have broken through.
As we see the welfare state turned against the welfare of poor people in this country, it’s clear that its future is inextricable from the broader trajectory of the country. After all, there’s no ending mass incarceration and deportation without ending their instantiations in the welfare state; and no redeemable welfare state can exist in the context of carceral and nativist governance. The Trump administration will likely continue using welfare programs as mechanisms of repression and deportation, largely because his elected political opposition seems unwilling or unable to stop it or offer an alternative vision for the welfare of the public that might help change our political trajectory.
Yet we do have other guiding lights. If we might look to Minnesota—where today, everyday people are providing one another with food, clothing, and shelter in ways that eschew the politics of policing deservingness—we can see a model of how we might build a better form of welfare than we have ever known. 
This article was commissioned by Catherine S. Ramírez and A. Naomi Paik.
- These include the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing vouchers, and other programs that constitute what Suzanne Mettler called the submerged welfare state, invisible to most Americans and thus unable to cohere mass support. ↩
- Michael Grunwald, “Public Housing Officials Wary of Proposal to Overhaul HUD,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1994. ↩
