Neronha Sues to Block Federal Grab of TANF Data

On August 3rd, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha joined 23 other jurisdictions in federal court in Washington, D.C., asking a judge to stop a federal policy — scheduled to take effect one week from Monday — that would allow the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to hand over the Social Security numbers, addresses, and immigration status of families receiving cash assistance to other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The mechanism at the center of the case is bureaucratic enough that it could pass unnoticed, which is precisely the point of paying attention to it. In June, the Administration for Children and Families, the arm of HHS that oversees the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant, published what is called a System of Records Notice — a Privacy Act filing in which an agency declares what personal data it keeps and, critically, the "routine uses" for which it may release that data. The notice, published in the Federal Register on June 23rd, added a new routine use, numbered 10, authorizing disclosure of TANF records to "another federal or grantee agency" helping ACF with program integrity reviews, including verifying whether states are checking recipients' citizenship or immigration status. Most of the notice took effect immediately. Routine use 10 does not take effect until August 11th — a delay the agency granted after technical problems with its public comment portal.

That eight-day gap between the filing of this lawsuit and the effective date is the whole ballgame. The states are asking a court to declare the policy illegal and block it before it switches on, and a federal judge in the District of Columbia has very little runway to do it.

The legal argument is a federalism argument before it is a privacy argument. TANF was created by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the welfare overhaul signed on August 22, 1996, which sends more than $16 billion a year in block grants to states, territories, and tribal governments and leaves them broad discretion over how to spend it — childcare subsidies, emergency housing for families fleeing domestic violence, emergency food assistance, help for grandparents raising grandchildren. Section 402(b) of that law assigns the job of determining whether a qualified immigrant is eligible for TANF to the states, not to Washington. The coalition contends that ACF, by claiming authority to inspect and redistribute beneficiary records, is seizing a function Congress gave the states, and that it did so in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how agencies make rules, and the Spending Clause of the Constitution, which limits the conditions the federal government may attach to money it has already promised.

Neronha's framing was blunter. "Americans are universally concerned about sensitive personal information getting into the wrong hands, and unfortunately, in 2026, the wrong hands belong to the Trump Administration," he said in announcing the suit. "Once again, the President is attempting to unlawfully gain access to sensitive data including social security numbers, addresses, and more."

To be fair to the other side — and the other side has not yet filed anything — the administration's stated rationale is not exotic. ACF says it needs the data to assess whether states are in fact verifying recipients' citizenship or immigration status before cutting checks, which is a compliance-monitoring function agencies perform in dozens of programs. No detailed federal legal defense has been filed.

Here in Rhode Island, TANF operates as the Rhode Island Works Program, administered by the Department of Human Services under R.I. General Laws § 40-5.2, and eligibility requires residency plus citizenship or qualifying immigration status. The most recent state-level count available from ACF, for fiscal year 2020, put Rhode Island at 3,491 TANF families. Thousands of households, in other words, whose files sit in the system the notice describes.

The states' sharpest practical claim is about behavior rather than law: that if word spreads through immigrant neighborhoods that a benefits application feeds DHS, people who are lawfully eligible will simply stop applying — the trust that state caseworkers spent years assembling coming apart faster than an overcooked strand of linguine lifted from the pot. A separate suit filed the same day in federal court in Brooklyn by Make the Road States, Common Cause, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation presses additional claims under the Privacy Act of 1974.

Twenty-three attorneys general and the District of Columbia's are plaintiffs, joined by the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania. No court has ruled. Routine use 10 becomes operative on August 11th unless one does.