EL PASO, Tx., November 10, 2025: With the federal shutdown now the longest in the nation’s history, city officials fear only weeks of food for low-income El Pasoans is left. An official who agreed to speak to us for background purposes only because they are not authorized to speak publicly about food scarcity told us that city officials were told recently that at most El Paso has a month of food reserves before running out.
Even before the loss of SNAP benefits for low-income El Pasoans due to the shutdown, El Paso was facing food insecurity problems.
A special report prepared by the Paso del Norte Institute for Health Living in 2017 found that “more than 160,000 El Paso County residents, including over 52,000 children, live in lower-income communities with limited supermarket access.” The report also identified that over 10% of El Pasoans were “often” worried that money would run out before receiving their next paycheck, food subsidy or both. This compares to the 4% across the country who worried about running out of money for food. Almost 8% of El Pasoans “often” ran out of money for food, compared to 3% nationally. Around 30% of El Pasoans “sometimes” worried about running out of food or ran out of food before they had money to feed their families…