Melanie Stansbury

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury met this week with Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque to discuss the state of food and hunger in New Mexico.

Katy Anderson, the vice president of strategy, partnerships and advocacy at Roadrunner, said the conversation centered on what’s happening locally.

“At Roadrunner Food Bank, we always reach out to our federal delegation and tell them we'd love to meet with you, visit with you, kind of about what we're seeing on the ground … so that they're able to take that information back with them to D.C.,” Anderson said.

The meeting comes as the nonprofit feels the impacts of federal cuts to SNAP benefits.

“We’re here at Roadrunner Food Bank to highlight the huge travesty and catastrophic drop-off of food assistance that’s happened as a result of federal policy that passed last year under the ‘one big beautiful bill,’” Stansbury, D-N.M., said.

Jason Riggs, the director of advocacy at Roadrunner, spoke on the importance of SNAP benefits in relation to the food bank.

“You could look at it like SNAP is the first line of defense against food insecurity in our country; food banks are the last line of defense. So the idea is we need both,” Riggs said.

According to Anderson, in January, Roadrunner Food Bank saw a 79% increase in the number of people seeking assistance compared with January of last year.

Stansbury said the federal funding cuts have had big effects on New Mexicans.

“That bill set into motion a series of cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs that have caused 4.5 million Americans to lose access to benefits. Here in New Mexico, we’ve seen 21,652 New Mexicans lose food assistance,” she said.

Riggs said there are over 10,000 children in households that no longer have SNAP, dating back to at least October.

“That number is not going away,” Riggs said.

Stansbury said tackling food insecurity among children will take an "all‑of‑the‑above approach — SNAP, universal school meals and state food assistance funding through our food banks."

The representative said reversing the federal funding cuts is the way to tackle food insecurity.

“I have a bill called the SNAP Back Bill, which we filed during the government shutdown, to stop them from cutting SNAP benefits, so that was the large piece of legislation to address the initial SNAP cuts,” she said. “But at the end of the day, what we need to do is to reverse the cuts.”