Florida families could buckle under the pressure of Trump policies

On a recent Wednesday morning, a hot pink van emblazoned with the words “Keeping South Florida Babies in Need Clean, Happy & Healthy Since 2013” pulled into the parking lot of the North Miami Beach Library. The van’s side door opened, revealing a shelf packed with diapers and a counter stacked with baby wipe packs. 

The van belongs to the Miami Diaper Bank. The nonprofit collects diapers and other supplies from donors and distributes them to families in need, many of whom live in this area of Miami-Dade County. The library is one of their prime locations.

A slow trickle of families, many of them led by mothers pushing strollers, soon began to appear to collect tote bags filled with diapers, baby food, and other essentials. About three dozen families were expected that day. At an event a few days earlier, more than 100 families showed up. Miami Diaper Bank provides 50 diapers per child per month. Sizes range from preemie babies to pull-ups for toddlers; there are larger diapers for children with special needs.

Growing inflation and rising housing costs all over the region has meant a greater demand for the nonprofit’s services. Earlier this year, as many as 20 new families signed up every week, up from their customary three to four families per week, says Gabriela Rojas, the bank’s executive director. Most of the roughly 2,300 children they serve per month live in households below the poverty line that rely on federal programs like food assistance and Medicaid, she added. Diaper banks nationwide have noted similar increases in clients, according to the National Diaper Bank Network. According to the network’s data, 46 percent of families nationwide with children under the age of 4 couldn’t afford diapers in 2024.

The cost of diapers has already increased by 20 percent since 2018, and now tariffs are expected to further hike the cost of diapers manufactured or made from materials from abroad. In recent conversations with other Florida diaper banks, Rojas noted, the group discussed the escalating costs of other baby items, like strollers and formula.

The experience at the Miami Diaper Bank is being replicated in social service nonprofits all over the country. Other charities interviewed by Mother Jones already had noted an increase in the number of families needing their support in recent years. And now, with looming federal funding cuts to crucial assistance programs for low-income families, combined with the threat of tariffs, the need will certainly grow, further straining a system that has been on overdrive since the COVID-19 pandemic. “We anticipate an even bigger influx of families looking for us to be their safety net,” Rojas says. Some charities also expressed concern that federal cuts could directly impact them, potentially limiting the services they can provide.

Families with lower incomes never fully recovered from the Covid pandemic, says Elaine Maag, a tax expert specializing in lower and middle-income families at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization. In 2021, an expanded child tax credit for families with children helped keep them afloat. But when the tax cut ended in 2022, “We started noticing families reporting they’re having trouble, once again, paying for basic needs,” Maag says. And families are now facing the possibility of cuts to life-sustaining programs like SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and Headstart, combined with the threat of tariffs that will raise the cost of everyday goods. The inevitable result will be a rise in poverty with cascading effects on families, particularly those with young children.

“When children don’t have access to appropriate healthcare and appropriate nutrition, especially in those early years, it can have a lifetime of negative effects,” Maag says. Children who are hungry at school, for instance, find it more difficult to learn, which sets them up for potential difficulty in graduating from high school, much less attending college. Later in life, she explains, they likely will need assistance. “So these investments in children very early are important,” she notes.

One of the first mothers to arrive at the North Miami Beach library was Naw San. She pushed her daughter’s stroller toward the pink van, her toddler son in Paw Patrol shoes trailing behind her. San says she has been enrolled at the diaper bank since the pandemic. The assistance helps her stretch her family’s income so they can cover other household expenses, like the electric bill and groceries. “I’m really grateful for that,” she says.

Yessenia Bustamante arrived shortly after, pushing a stroller with her two-year-old son, who was wearing a baseball cap stitched with dinosaurs. She walked about ten blocks to the library. For the last five months, the diaper bank has made it possible for her to spend more money on fruit and vegetables for her son. “Things have gotten more expensive,” she says. Bustamante works as a delivery driver and her husband remodels bathrooms. But even with their combined incomes, plus food assistance and the free diapers, it’s been difficult to make ends meet, she says. Recently, her rent also increased. “Little by little, we are getting by,” she says.

More than half of residents in North Miami Beach are immigrants, many of them from Latin America and Haiti, according to recent US Census data, with nearly 15 percent of all residents living below the poverty line. Miami Diaper Bank’s other distribution site—Florida City—also has a large Latin American community that makes up a third of its population. The diaper bank has usually distributed supplies at the city hall parking lot. But with its location right next to a police station, Rojas says she is considering moving their site given the growing collaboration between local police and federal immigration enforcement. “We want them to feel safe and secure coming to get what they need for their kids,” she says. 

Charities themselves may also be impacted by federal funding cuts. At Camillus House, which provides services to people and families experiencing homelessness in the Miami area, CEO Eddie Gloria has seen first-hand how rising housing costs in Miami, now one of the most expensive cities in the country, have affected the community. “It’s what I call the falling off middle class,” he says. “Folks who used to be able to get through or get by at least with the area median income are now severely struggling.”

Every night, approximately 1,600 people sleep at shelters or housing units run by Camillus House—including 200 single-family homes for families with children. Residents who are employed pay 30 percent of their gross income toward rent. Camillus House receives funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is among DOGE’s targets. If the cuts happen, Gloria predicts “a crisis of homelessness among families and children that are supported by systems like ours.”

Then there are the threatened rollbacks of the SNAP program, which provides food assistance to lower income households, which would place further strain on food banks and pantries. Today, even though unemployment rates remain low, food banks across the country are seeing record high demand, according to Feeding America, which partners with more than 200 food banks nationwide that are on track to provide nearly 6 billion meals this year. But these services are meant to be supplemental, not the primary source of food assistance for families.

Since the pandemic, Feeding Tampa Bay, a Feeding America member that serves ten counties in southwest Florida, saw a 30 percent increase in need—and that has not waned, says CEO Thomas Mantz. “The challenge right now is the increased demand against a potential reduction in resources and that’s never a good trajectory,” Mantz says. “Those are two cars leaving in opposite directions and the gulf only gets wider.”

Village Elementary School is located in Sunrise, a city of 96,000 residents in Broward County where more than one in ten residents live below the poverty line. One Friday morning, dozens of cars were lined up bumper to bumper around the block for an event hosted by a food distribution nonprofit called Joshua’s Heart Foundation, and other community partners.

The goal was to help 400 families that morning. The drive resembled an assembly line, as volunteers loaded boxes, donated by Feed the Children, of pantry goods, produce, toiletries, and children’s toys into cars. At its headquarters in North Miami Beach, Joshua’s Heart distributes groceries to more than 100 families every week. Within a few hours, all the boxes had been distributed.

Joshua’s Heart has remained busy since the pandemic, says Karen Grey, publicist for the foundation. “We don’t know what that’s going to look like as the need increases and as everybody starts to feel the results of tariffs and higher prices,” she says. “The need has never gone away and it’s going to intensify. We have to figure out how to be sustainable through it.”