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Impact Report 2025 – 2026

“NCLEJ is uniquely positioned to answer the urgency of this moment. Poverty, racial oppression, and discrimination against people with disabilities are all interrelated – one cannot be eradicated without confronting the others. Through our impact litigation, targeted policy advocacy, and organizing efforts at the intersection of economic, racial, and disability justice, we are fighting alongside vulnerable communities to build the foundation for a better future.” 

Jason D. Williamson
Executive Director, NCLEJ

View, download and share the Impact Report PDF here!

Our National Impact

In recent years, we’ve secured significant legal victories and other exciting developments on behalf of low-income people across the nation. Whether expanding access to public benefits, ensuring the enforcement of protections under the ADA, or enhancing due process for marginalized people, we continue to make critical progress in our efforts to advance racial, economic, and disability justice. 

The scope of our work is nationwide. Here are highlights of our recent victories and ongoing legal advocacy across the country: 

Alabama 

In 2025, NCLEJ achieved a significant settlement in our lawsuit against the City of Montgomery over their operation of a modern-day debtor’s prison, which was used disproportionately by law enforcement to target and detain low-income drivers of color for traffic violations. Those who could not pay immediately were placed on “probation” with Judicial Correction Services, a for-profit private company that charged extortionate fees, forcing detainees into a punitive cycle of debt and imprisonment.

Alaska 

For several years, low-income Alaskans have been unlawfully denied SNAP benefits due to the State’s backlog of SNAP applications and recertifications, consistent understaffing, and their overloaded call center. In January 2025, we won a preliminary injunction requiring the State to process SNAP applications and recertifications within legal timeframes, and as of September 2025, average SNAP delays went from 11 months to 47 days—a marked improvement thanks to our legal intervention. Unfortunately, in May 2026, the court dismissed our claims and vacated the injunction, citing a recent, harmful Supreme Court decision that restricts access to the courts for federal benefits recipients. NCLEJ has filed a notice of appeal to challenge the Alaska court’s misguided decision.

Florida 

NCLEJ has partnered with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to expand adoption of the award-winning Worker-Driven Social Responsibility model to protect human rights in global supply chains. Our innovative relationship is among the first of its kind in which a nonprofit law office serves as the legal support arm for a grassroots worker advocacy group. NCLEJ houses legal staff dedicated to advancing CIW’s mission to improve the wages and working conditions of farmworkers and provides crucial support to CIW’s campaigns to bring more participating buyers into their innovative program and maintain existing relationships with buyers.

Georgia 

Following the federal District Court’s August 2015 approval of the parties’ settlement agreement mandating the State’s compliance with Food Stamp Act requirements to timely process applications and issue benefits to eligible households, NCLEJ began monitoring compliance, including the State’s issuance of $22 million in retroactive benefits to some 48,000 households. We continue to work with the State to ensure that Georgians receive the support they need in a timely and consistent manner.

Illinois

In May 2026, we reached a settlement with a private reentry housing provider in our lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), and other private defendants to secure critical disability accommodations for a disabled individual, Mark Davenport, on Mandatory Supervised Release (MSR), a.k.a. parole. The lawsuit was first filed in November 2025. Because IDOC failed to accommodate Mr. Davenport’s physical disabilities when he was in the community, he was unnecessarily and illegally sent back to prison for four months. Despite its legal obligations, IDOC often fails to provide even the most basic disability accommodations to people on MSR. Those failures lead to people being sent back to prison when they would otherwise remain in the community with their family and friends. Litigation remains ongoing.

Michigan 

In January 2025, NCLEJ received court approval of a major settlement in Waskul v. Washtenaw County Community Mental Health, leading to more than $110 million in additional State expenditures for Michiganders living with intellectual and development disabilities, who rely on Medicaid Community Living Support. This follows a landmark ruling secured by NCLEJ in 2020 in which the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that isolation at home constitutes violations of the “integration mandate” under the ADA.

Missouri 

In November 2025, NCLEJ defended our victories in our lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Social Services over their SNAP dysfunction. Low-income Missourians are unlawfully denied access to SNAP benefits due to long call center wait times, wrongful denials of benefits, and lack of disability accommodations. We secured a court order against the Missouri DSS in May 2025 requiring the State to take remedial action to improve their SNAP program. Litigation remains ongoing.

New Jersey 

In 2023, NCLEJ Executive Director Jason D. Williamson and former Executive Director Dennis Parker joined the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice’s New Jersey Reparations Council to research and bring attention to the State’s involvement in slavery and its lasting impact on the contemporary life of Black New Jerseyans. In 2025, the Council published a robust report making bold policy recommendations for reparative justice policies designed to close the persistent racial wealth gap across the state.

Oklahoma 

On June 23, 2022, we filed a lawsuit to advance the First Amendment rights of racial justice protestors in Oklahoma City. Our clients are six incredible young activists who began protesting police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, only to face brutal repression. The City and County worked together to charge them with felonies and even sent the U.S. Marshals to their home to arrest them—all because our clients publicly expressed views critical of the police. Our lawsuit seeks damages and an end to the retaliatory harassment of racial justice activists.

Additionally, in Oklahoma City, we are providing legal and strategic support to DeFlockOKC, a coalition dedicated to combating a legally questionable mass surveillance and data extraction scheme. The Oklahoma City Council contracts a network of automatic license plate readers through the private technology company Flock Safety. Though the Council initially approved a surveillance network focused on photographing passing license plates through fixed-position units in 2023, the current surveillance system now has far more advanced capabilities, including: vehicle fingerprinting without a license plate; AI search integration; automatic pedestrian tracking; always-on audio; autonomous drone integration; and big-data collection. The legal status of Flock’s surveillance model is not settled and is actively being challenged in federal court across multiple lawsuits.

Tennessee 

In 2020, NCLEJ filed a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s policy and practice of unlawfully depriving both children and adults of Medicaid coverage, known in Tennessee as TennCare. A defective bureaucratic process for the redetermination of eligibility of TennCare enrollees has resulted in thousands of low-income individuals being terminated from coverage without due process, and in a manner that discriminates against persons with disabilities. Litigation remains ongoing.

Vermont 

NCLEJ represented Migrant Justice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building power within the immigrant farmworker community, in a federal lawsuit against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The lawsuit challenged the government’s efforts to target Migrant Justice leaders in retaliation for speaking out about their rights, in violation of the First Amendment, as well as the DMV’s practice of information-sharing and collaboration with ICE. In January 2020, we reached a settlement with the DMV to restrict communication and information-sharing between the DMV and federal immigration agencies. In October 2020, we reached a settlement with ICE and DHS, ending the deportation cases against our clients, granting deferred action, paying damages, and agreeing to instruct officers about their duty to respect and protect First Amendment rights.

NCLEJ also represents Migrant Justice in their Milk with Dignity campaign, a groundbreaking human rights program organized by dairy farmworkers. In October 2017, Migrant Justice and Ben & Jerry’s signed a historic agreement making Ben & Jerrys the first major dairy corporation to join the Milk with Dignity Program, which requires its supplier farms to comply with better working conditions in dairy supply chains. In October 2025, the Milk with Dignity Program expanded through a new partnership with Vermont Way Foods, whose cheese will be wholly sourced in collaboration with the program.

National  

In March 2026, NCLEJ sued the USDA in federal district court in Washington D.C. over their expansion of unlawful food restriction waivers that limit the types of food that can be purchased with SNAP benefits. The lawsuit challenges food restriction waivers in Colorado, Iowa, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Nebraska. By failing to provide notice and allow public comment before approval of these waivers, the USDA violated the Administrative Procedures Act. Our clients argued that these unlawful food restriction waivers deprived SNAP recipients of access to the food they need, threatening their health and welfare, while imposing significant burdens on retailers. In June 2026, the court granted our motion for summary judgment, finding that the USDA lacked the statutory authority to implement its food restriction program. As such, the court vacated the USDA’s approval of such programs, halting implementation in all five states named in the complaint—and casting doubt on the validity of similar programs in other states across the country.

In July 2026, NCLEJ sued the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking transparency about the Trump administration’s unprecedented restrictions on federal childcare and family assistance funding. In late December 2025 and early January 2026, HHS froze access to more than $10 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) programs in California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, and imposed new documentation and approval requirements on states nationwide. These actions jeopardize essential childcare, family assistance, and social services that enable families with low incomes to work, attend school, and meet basic needs.

In May 2025, NCLEJ sued the USDA over the Trump administration’s unlawful attempts to obtain the personal information of millions of SNAP recipients. The USDA requested “unfettered access to comprehensive data,” including records stored by private companies that process SNAP payments, with no clear explanation for how this data will be used. The USDA letter indicated that any failure to comply with the order could result in the withholding of funds to state agencies. In response to our lawsuit, the USDA paused their illegal demands in June 2025, before once again threatening states with the same unlawful request. In September 2025, we filed for summary judgment, and are awaiting a decision from the court.

Our Impact At Home

Since our founding at Columbia University at the height of the Civil Rights Era, NCLEJ has delivered justice for low-income New Yorkers. Over 40% of our casework focuses on empowering low-income communities within the state we call home, and we have deep, collaborative relationships with legal services and nonprofit advocacy groups within New York City and across the state.   

Here are highlights of our recent victories and ongoing advocacy in New York:   

Our Community Partners

NCLEJ proudly partners with community organizations on the ground to advance our mission. We understand that the fight for economic, racial, and disability justice is not dictated by strategies created at a distance, but in collaboration with the local communities most affected by the problems we seek to address. Collaborating with local and community-led organizations improves our ability to provide practical and direct legal assistance, as well as expands our geographic reach. In return, we boost the capacity of our partners to achieve their goals   

In recent years, we’ve partnered with many local organizations across the nation, including: 

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