For about three blocks leading up to St. Mary’s Food Bank in west Phoenix, traffic is inching along.
“We’re 100 cars deep, three lanes wide, it’s spilling out into Thomas Road,” said St. Mary’s spokesperson Jerry Brown, looking out on the line of cars Tuesday morning. “Normally we don’t see that except during our holiday distributions.”
As the hundreds of cars slowly move forward through the long line, volunteers load their trunks with boxes of produce, pantry staples, and even soda.
St. Mary’s is the state’s oldest and largest food bank. And Brown said these waits have been getting longer for a few years now as inflation and the costs of living stretch family budgets thinner and thinner. The food bank has seen about a 10% year-over-year increase in demand for the past four years, Brown said.
“We’ve seen a huge jump in the number of seniors because they’re on fixed incomes. While inflation has jumped 9% or 10%, their paychecks have stayed the same,” Brown said.
But just in the last few days, the line has started to grow even more.
Food stamps are about to run out for hundreds of thousands of Arizonans. As the federal government shutdown drags toward the one-month mark, payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are set to be frozen nationwide on Nov. 1. That’s bringing more first-time visitors to St. Mary’s and other food banks.
Among the newcomers Tuesday was Cecilia Bencomo, who said she came to St. Mary’s when she found out her SNAP benefits won’t be coming through for next month.
“I was like, what am I going to do? I have kids in the house,” Bencomo said.
Bencomo said her girlfriend’s paycheck is enough to cover rent and bills for the two of them and their three kids. But Bencomo has been out of work lately, so for about a year, the family has relied on SNAP to cover groceries. The monthly funds they get are usually just barely enough, Bencomo said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture in mid-October told states not to issue funds for SNAP recipients for next month. A message on the USDA website blames Congressional Democrats for the ongoing shutdown and says “the well has run dry.”
Bencomo worries about what that will mean for her family.
“I’m upset, I’m sad about it because I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Bencomo said. “It’s very frustrating.”
In Arizona, more than 887,000 people rely on SNAP for monthly food assistance. Households get about $180 per person, per month.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has said without federal payments, there's not enough money in the state budget to keep the program going.
"Arizona doesn't have the capacity to backfill this,” Hobbs told reporters last week. “We've been very clear about that. We're looking for every way we can to mitigate. We're going to really count on our nonprofit social services to step up and be partners, helping fill some of those gaps."
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is suing the Trump administration, along with Democratic leaders from several other states, saying the USDA does have a contingency fund of more than $5 billion that could be tapped to keep SNAP running during the shutdown.
The USDA argues it can’t legally use that fund in this situation.
Meanwhile, Nov. 1 is fast-approaching.
The Arizona Department of Economic Security, which administers SNAP in the state, is directing Arizona SNAP recipients to local food banks like St. Mary’s if they need immediate assistance.
The shutdown-related rise in demand comes as food banks nationwide are already facing cuts.
The USDA in March cut $1 billion in funding for school lunch and food bank programs. Those federal cuts have left St. Mary’s about two million pounds short of food this year, Brown said.
That’s a financial hit to the organization, Brown said, but it’s only a small fraction of the 130 million pounds that the food bank distributes annually. And Brown said overall, St. Mary’s only relies on federal funding for about 25% of its budget – many other food banks get more than half of their budget from federal dollars.
“We’ve been working for years to make sure that we’re less reliant on things that are subject to these kinds of changes,” Brown said. “We’re a large food bank, we have a lot of resources, we have a fantastic donor base.”
But Brown said St. Mary’s doesn’t know how long the shutdown will last, how long SNAP funds will be frozen, or how far its resources may have to stretch.
“There was $155 million paid out to SNAP recipients in Arizona in September,” Brown said. “We can’t make up that number. That’s not a number we can shoulder.”
The food bank is asking for more donations and more volunteers, and just bracing for a spike in demand, Brown said.
“We don’t know what the impact [of the SNAP freeze] will be,” Brown said, but he added, inevitably, “the lines are going to be longer. There are going to be more people.”
Michael Andrews said he sat in his car more than an hour before he got to the front of the line at St. Mary’s Tuesday morning. Andrews is also a SNAP recipient who was coming to a food bank for the first time.
He said he already used up all of the SNAP funds he received for October and didn’t know whether to believe what he had been hearing about benefits pausing in November.
“Is that true? Nobody’s going to get food stamps in November because of the government shutdown?” Andrews asked. “If I don’t get it, I’m going to be in a serious bad way.”
After his long wait in the car, he said he was grateful to at least be going home with a few things to eat. But to Andrews, the situation feels extremely frustrating. Before he drove away, he had one more thought to add.
“Hey, tell the government to quit [expletive] around and go back to work.”
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