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Recipients need to prove they work or volunteer – NBC4 Washington
Big changes are coming to a federal program that has been helping low-income families pay for food for generations.
The changes could mean millions of Americans will no longer receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Starting Monday, June 1, the federal government will require certain people who receive SNAP benefits to show they are either working or volunteering for community services.
In D.C., more than 130,000 residents rely on SNAP benefits to feed their families. According to District officials, about 18,000 are at risk of losing those benefits as the Trump administration will begin enforcing work requirements Monday.
“We want to help people avoid losing benefits when that’s possible. And for that, there are three paths that we’re trying to create,” D.C. City Administrator Kevin Donahue said. “One is work requirements, so people work. That’s generally about 20 hours a week or 80 hours a month. One is work training. So they’re in a training program. Also, they have to do that about 80 hours a month or 20 hours a week. And the final one that’s very intriguing that other states have looked at is a volunteer program. You’re allowed to volunteer. The requirement for that is about eight hours a week. So it’s less than being in training or work.”
While the new requirements will affect millions of people across the country, most SNAP recipients will be exempt. Those covered by exemptions include:
- anyone under age 18, or age 65 or older
- residents with mental or physical health conditions, including pregnancy
- those who are already working 30 hours per week or already enrolled in school
- caregivers
While the requirements will take effect on June 1, recipients have three months to come into compliance, so nobody is in danger of losing benefits until sometime in September.
This isn’t the only big change for the millions of Americans who rely on assistance from the federal government; starting Jan. 1, 2027, Medicaid recipients will be held to similar work requirements. It’s estimated as many as 5 million Americans could lose their Medicaid coverage as a result.
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Quiet start to the week; rain, heat, humidity return by this weekend
Conditions will be warm and quiet to kick off the work week before shower and thunderstorm chances ramp up bringing more heat and humidity back to the area by this weekend and next week.
Today and Tuesday will be on the quiet side with mostly sunny skies today and partly cloudy skies on Tuesday. Temperatures both days will hover in the low-80s across the area with relatively light winds averaging between 5 and 15 mph with occasional gusts up to 20 mph possible on Tuesday. Tuesday night will become mostly cloudy heading into Wednesday morning. Overnight temperatures will be comfortable, dropping into the upper-50s by Tuesday morning and by Wednesday morning.
Wednesday will then be mostly cloudy and warm as temperatures once again top out in the low-80s. Winds will be on the breezy side, hovering between 15 and 20 mph, gusts up to 30 mph possible. Showers and thunderstorms are projected to move into the area after midnight as temperatures start dropping into the mid-60s by Thursday morning.
From there, we are looking at scattered shower and thunderstorm chances throughout Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Despite the cloudy skies and rain chances, temperatures over those three days will remain warm, topping out in the low-80s on Thursday and the mid-80s for Friday and Saturday. Winds through the three days will hover between 5 and 15 mph with occasional gusts up to 20 mph possible at times. Overnight temperatures are projected to drop into the mid-60s by the following mornings with showers and thunderstorms continuing on and off.
Rain chances are projected to wrap up throughout Saturday afternoon but isolated chances may remain in the forecast throughout Sunday. Once these rain chances taper off, humidity will ramp back up across the area along with temperatures. This will lead to hot and humid conditions with heat index values likely well into the 90s for nearly all of next week. It is important to remember to stay hydrated by drinking plenty of water and by taking breaks from the heat and sun by cooling off in air conditioned buildings. Remember that swimming, whether you’re in a pool or at the beach, is not staying hydrated or considered taking a break from the heat as you are still out in the hot and humid conditions in general.
Sunday will then be partly cloudy with a few isolated showers possible as temperatures hover in the upper-80s. With the humidity in the mix, it will likely feel more like the low to mid-90s across the area. Winds will bring a pleasant but warm breeze to the area, coming from the southeast between 10 and 15 mph, gusts up to 20 mph possible. Sunday night will remain partly cloudy as temperatures drop into the upper-60s by Monday morning.
Monday will basically be a repeat of Sunday with partly cloudy skies, highs in the upper-80s, and heat index values likely in the low to mid-90s. Winds will also be pleasant but warm, coming from the southeast between 10 and 15 mph, gusts up to 20 mph at times possible. Monday night will gradually become mostly clear as temperatures drop into the upper-60s and low-70s by Tuesday morning.
Tuesday and Wednesday will be the hottest days of next week so far. We are looking at highs in the upper-80s and low-90s with heat index values likely in the mid, possibly upper-90s across the area. Winds will be light from the south, southeast between 5 and 15 mph. Overnight conditions are expected to remain mostly clear and quiet as temperatures drop into the low-70s by the following mornings.
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Copyright 2026 KEYC. All rights reserved.
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International Friendly LIVE: Wales vs Ghana – score, TV coverage, radio commentary, text updates & match stats
Team news – Ampadu and Moore return as Wales make four changespublished at 19:04 BST
Wales v Ghana (19:45 BST)
Dafydd Pritchard
BBC Sport Wales at Cardiff City Stadium
Image source, Huw Evans Picture AgencyWales head coach Craig Bellamy has named as strong a team as
he realistically can, considering the options at his disposal.
Leeds United’s player of the season, Ethan Ampadu, returns
in midfield to captain the team, while Wrexham’s Kieffer Moore is recalled up
front.
Another Leeds player, winger Daniel James, and Cardiff City
centre-back Dylan Lawlor are the other players restored as Bellamy makes four
changes from the friendly draw against Northern Ireland in March.
The players who drop out are Ben Cabango and Harry Wilson,
who have withdrawn from the squad, and Joel Colwill and Lewis Koumas, who are
on the bench.
There are three uncapped players among the substitutes:
Jayden Lienou, Ollie Bostock and Cameron Congreve.
Wales: Darlow; Williams, Rodon, Lawlor, Dasilva; Ampadu (C), Sheehan; James, Brooks, Thomas; Moore.
Subs: Ward, King, Mepham, Roberts, Lienou, Kpakio, Norrington-Davies, Andrews, Colwill, Congreve, Bostock, I. Davies, Johnson, Broadhead
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Stripping U.S. citizenship for some is harder than Trump vowed : NPR
Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
Stay up to date with our Politics newsletter, sent weekly.
The Trump administration has vowed to step up revocations of citizenship from some naturalized Americans as part of a broader effort to double down on immigration enforcement.
The messaging has sparked fear among immigrant advocates, legal scholars and naturalized citizens who worry about the potential for abuse and the precedent it sets that naturalized immigrants are in a separate class from U.S.-born Americans.
But the cases filed so far are narrower than this rhetoric suggests, highlighting the legal and practical constraints on using this tool more broadly.
NPR reviewed 34 publicly announced denaturalization cases filed or resolved by the DOJ as of May 19, including 11 revocations of citizenship.
“I’m not seeing a major surge of worrisome denaturalizations. To me, it’s not at the level of an emergency,” said Daniel Kanstroom, professor of law at Boston College who specializes in immigration.
In the last 16 months, the Trump Justice Department says it surpassed the number of cases filed during all four years of the Biden administration — 64, according to available data. The administration is pitching a supercharged denaturalization effort as yet another way to address border security.
“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process,” a DOJ spokesman said in a statement. “We are moving at warp speed to ensure fraudsters are held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent.”
In a speech at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in May, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche echoed the sentiment, saying the department was “trying to protect the integrity of the naturalization process.”
“Protect the citizenry”
To supporters of the effort such as Gene Hamilton, president of the nonprofit conservative group America First Legal, this kind of work should have been happening already.
“If you’re a serious government, if you’re a serious nation, one of your foremost duties is to protect the citizenry and protect the meaning and the value of citizenship,” he said.
But the cases brought so far illustrate how difficult it could be for the administration to pursue denaturalization on a mass scale, according to Kanstroom and other immigration law experts. Unlike the administration’s broader deportation agenda, which involves swift and aggressive detentions and deportations, naturalized U.S. citizens have much stronger legal protections.
People wave U.S. flags to celebrate becoming U.S. citizens after taking the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony in the jury assembly room at the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston, Mass., in January 2025.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
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Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
“These are cases in which the law is pretty clear that people are entitled to due process. They’re entitled to be heard by a federal judge, not just an immigration judge. So the protections in place for people facing denaturalization are pretty robust,” Kanstroom said.
Cassandra Robertson, law professor at Case Western Reserve University, largely agrees such cases are harder to bring. But she’s still worried about the implications of using denaturalization more broadly than prior administrations have.
“The denaturalization efforts are an attempt to suppress the political speech of naturalized citizens,” she argued. “Although the cases that have been brought first are maybe people who’ve committed some pretty bad crimes, the government’s rhetoric is certainly not limited to that.”
The DOJ didn’t respond to most of NPR’s questions for this story.
What do these cases tell us?
Denaturalization cases are historically rare and typically target people accused of concealing serious criminal conduct or illegal affiliations with terrorist groups while they’re going through the naturalization process.
The 34 cases reviewed by NPR largely involve allegations of fraud, child sexual abuse, terrorism-related activity, war crimes and drug trafficking. In court filings, the DOJ argues the defendants concealed conduct that would have disqualified them from demonstrating the “good moral character” required for citizenship.
In one recent case, the DOJ revoked the citizenship of Melchor Munoz after arguing he lied and concealed the fact that he was dealing drugs during his naturalization process.
His attorney, Joe Pace, disputes that claim and says the government relied heavily on inaccuracies in an old plea agreement that stated Munoz began dealing drugs before becoming a citizen. Pace says the conduct actually began afterward, meaning his client should not have been subject to denaturalization. He added that Munoz, whose English is limited, was badly advised by his criminal lawyer at the time.
After a two-day trial, a federal judge sided with the DOJ, finding Munoz’s “testimony not credible.” Munoz, who still resides in Florida and is now on a green card, plans to appeal.
Losing sleep about “what it does to the system”
Kanstroom said the denaturalization cases publicly announced so far are on par with cases the U.S. government might have pursued in prior administrations.
He said he’s reassured by the fact that each of these cases have been assigned to judges in federal districts across the country, are going through the regular civil or criminal docket and are overall “happening within the parameters of the law.”
Robertson, of Case Western, said the government appears to be intentionally picking cases with criminal convictions because they are easier to win.
Still, Robertson, who has studied U.S. denaturalization, worries about where the policy could lead, especially because civil denaturalization cases come with fewer protections than criminal proceedings do.
Defendants in civil cases are not entitled to appointed attorneys if they cannot afford them. And civil denaturalization cases generally have no statute of limitations.
“When we’re talking about things that happened 20 or 30 or even more years ago, it is incredibly hard for anybody to be able to find witnesses who knew what was going on at that time, or have any kind of documentary evidence,” leaving defendants vulnerable to flimsy evidence, she said.
Minimal legal representation, court appearances
In many of the cases reviewed by NPR, the defendants lacked legal representation. Several cases resulted in denaturalization with minimal or no court appearance by the defendant.
That included the case of Vladimir Volgaev, a native of Ukraine, who became a U.S. citizen in 2016. In 2020, he was convicted of smuggling gun components from the U.S. to people in Ukraine and Italy. He was also convicted of theft of government money or property by underreporting his assets and income on applications for federal housing benefits, the DOJ says.
In a case filed in September, the DOJ claimed Volgaev concealed and misrepresented his involvement in the smuggling operation during his naturalization process and thus should lose citizenship. A summons was issued but neither Volgaev nor an attorney made a court appearance or filed a response in the case, court records show. Volgaev’s citizenship was revoked on March 23.
Another case of a lack of representation was for Elliott Duke, who the DOJ sued while they were already serving time in federal prison for distributing child pornography during Duke’s time in the U.S. Army. The DOJ filed the case in February 2025 and a federal judge ruled to revoke Duke’s citizenship roughly four months later. Duke, who uses they/them pronouns, previously told NPR they were unable to get a lawyer or travel to attend hearings.
“It’s just a dangerous road to go down for denaturalization. I might not feel sorry for the heinous child abuser who loses their citizenship. I’m not going to lose sleep over that,” said Robertson. “But I am going to lose sleep over what it does to the system. Because once it becomes easy to take somebody’s citizenship away — it becomes easy to take anybody’s citizenship away.”
Assigning U.S. attorneys
As the DOJ faces an exodus of thousands of skilled lawyers, the department has assigned denaturalization cases to U.S. attorneys offices across the country, a person familiar with this information confirmed. The person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
The offices of U.S. attorneys are now tasked with handling hundreds of cases of foreign-born Americans the department has identified as potential cases for revoking citizenship.
The DOJ didn’t respond to specific questions about these cases.
Stacey Young, founder of Justice Connection, an organization of former DOJ staffers, said denaturalization cases require “a huge expenditure of time and resources,” helping explain why the DOJ historically filed relatively few of them. Young used to be a DOJ attorney who worked on denaturalization cases.
“The recent plans for escalation are unprecedented and will require an immense amount of time and work by lawyers who are already stretched thin right now,” she said.
Hamilton, with America First Legal, said it’s worth it.
“It is exactly what the government should be doing. And quite frankly, I would like to see even more resources devoted to it as they’re able to do so,” he said.
Fears of politicization
But former DOJ attorneys, including Young, worry that prioritizing denaturalization cases could lead to retaliation against perceived enemies of the administration – something the current Justice Department has already been accused of doing.
Robertson pointed to comments from Trump and others in the administration threatening the citizenship of political opponents — such as New York City Mayor Mamdani and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar — as evidence that there is a real threat that the DOJ would use denaturalization as a tool for “political retribution.”
“The retaliatory nature of this administration and using the law in any type of legal maneuvering to go after its enemies — that is a serious concern of mine,” agreed a former DOJ attorney who worked for nearly a decade in the Office of Immigration Litigation, which handles denaturalization cases. The attorney spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the federal government.
Previously, attorneys in this office were given discretion to decide what cases to pursue. But things changed under the Trump administration and the mandate became to pursue anyone potentially eligible, even for minor paperwork errors or immaterial discrepancies, this person said.
Leaders at the department pressured lawyers to generate cases quickly, sometimes by combing through news stories or social media posts involving naturalized citizens, according to the former attorney, who left the DOJ last year.
Meanwhile, Kanstroom remains cautiously optimistic that denaturalizations won’t become politicized, since they’re legally and practically harder to pursue, or potentially abused, than other forms of immigration enforcement.
Defendants can still challenge the evidence presented against them and appeal rulings. Federal judges — not immigration judges employed by the DOJ — oversee these cases.
“I certainly don’t see an easy pathway for this administration to fast-track denaturalizations or do end runs around the judiciary,” he said.
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