A former Department of Homeland Security official has accused the Justice Department of threatening to "starve poor kids" in order to pressure states into supporting mass deportations.

Writing Thursday in an article for the Defiance Substack, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at DHS under President Donald Trump, warned that the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel has issued a legal opinion threatening to strip federal funding from states that decline to "snitch on illegal aliens." Taylor, a Republican who later became a prominent critic of the administration after revealing he was the author of an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed describing internal resistance to Trump, has continued to comment on homeland security policy from outside government.

Under the new guideline, states that accept federal money through TANF or SSI must direct all state agencies to report suspected undocumented immigrants to DHS or risk losing that funding. TANF — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — is the federal block-grant program that provides cash assistance to low-income families with children, while SSI, Supplemental Security Income, supports low-income people who are elderly, blind, or disabled.

"The families receiving these benefits are mostly American citizens, and the majority of TANF recipients are children," Taylor noted. "So the administration is not threatening to cut off benefits to people here illegally; it can't, because they don't receive any."

Instead, Taylor wrote, the DOJ and the Trump administration are "literally threatening to take food away from American children (and rent money away from their parents, disabled veterans, and elderly widows) in any state whose governor refuses to become an ICE informant." The clash is the latest flashpoint in the broader conflict between the administration and states, cities, and counties over immigration enforcement — a dispute that has also encompassed so-called sanctuary jurisdictions and repeated administration efforts to condition federal grants on immigration cooperation, an approach courts have previously scrutinized.

Taylor put the money at stake at $16.4 billion a year. He said the administration has put "a gun to the head of every governor in America" and that "the hostages are hungry children." Trump, he added, has threatened "to starve poor kids if states don't help with mass deportation."

Calling the move "among the most grotesque things I've ever seen Donald Trump do," Taylor boiled the mechanism down to a single line: "You won't snitch? Well, your kids won't eat."

Taylor argued the administration revealed its own motive, pointing to a DOJ spokesman who said the goal was to ensure "DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to." That statement, according to Taylor, proved the effort was "about feeding the deportation machine with data instead of feeding kids."