It has been a little more than two weeks since the Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitian residents across the country expired. That means many thousands who have been living in the United States as far back as 2010, when an earthquake devastated Haiti, are now subject to deportation.

Sandra Dieudonne is an immigration attorney for the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York Haitian Response Initiative. In New York, she described a community in tension, unsure what precautions to take as many wait to see how the Trump administration plans to proceed against such a large population of immigrants—one deeply entrenched in many communities and a major workforce presence in health care and other industries.

What comes next?

“We just really don’t know what’s going to happen, how the ICE agents are going to work, how they’re going to capture people,” she said. “We’re not sure if it’s going to be a deluge of ICE agents or if they’re just coming to your homes or community centers. We just don’t know what level or escalation this will be.”

Low-profile apprehensions have been continuing, she said, although nothing on the scale that cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis experienced. ICE officials “realized that doing that hurt them, P.R. wise. It just didn’t look good that they’re ripping children from their families and U.S. citizens were actually killed. So I think that they are not enforcing it in that way.”

But enough detentions have been conducted that many Haitians have already begun moving to other nations that may respect asylum claims, Ms. Dieudonne said. Others hope to remain in the United States but are now afraid to leave their homes. Many may choose to self-deport, as Trump administration officials urge, but they will have no homes to return to in villages or neighborhoods that were not rebuilt after the earthquake or others now completely under siege by criminal gangs.

Church officials report that those gangs now control between 70 and 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, as well as other regions and cities in Haiti, “collecting illegal tolls and forcing parishes, schools and religious institutions to close.”

Even as Trump administration officials insist immigrants can be safely returned to Haiti, the State Department maintains a Level 4 “Do not travel” advisory for Haiti and confines State Department staff to embassy grounds. Conditions in Port-au-Prince are so insecure that U.S. carriers are prohibited from flying into the capital’s airport. Ms. Dieudonne speculates that limitation will greatly hinder the administration’s deportation ambitions.

Many Haitian residents will endure this period of uncertainty newly unemployed as businesses and agencies observed the July 27 cut-off and began terminating workers who had previously been lawfully employed under T.P.S. In New York, hundreds of Haitian workers employed in municipal services were laid off by the mayor’s office on Aug. 7.

The full impact of the loss of as many as 200,000 members of the U.S. workforce is only now becoming apparent. Ms. Dieudonne pointed out that Haitian immigrants have a strong role in America’s health care and IT industries; they have been employed in light manufacturing and delivery and shipping services and in the nation’s air travel, hospitality and restaurant industries. It is not clear if Trump officials have thought through the social and economic implications of the dislocation they are pursuing, she suggested.

“These people were legal, and you made them illegal,” she said. “That’s the crux of it.”

Ms. Dieudonne said that a lot of her recent work has been devoted to helping employers understand that they may be able to keep Haitian employees on their payrolls because they remain protected by asylum claims and other immigration statuses despite losing T.P.S.

In Miami, which hosts the largest Haitian community in the country, Archbishop Thomas Wenski described Haitian residents of his archdiocese as “very tense, very nervous” as they await whatever comes next.

That tension extends far beyond the many thousands who have lost T.P.S. The archbishop explained that most Haitian families include a mixture of people with varying degrees of legal residency and citizenship, from people who just became “undocumented” because of the T.P.S. lapse to the Haitian-born who have become naturalized citizens.

Other family members may have active asylum claims or other forms of legal residency. Many families now include members who are first- or even second-generation Americans.

The anxiety runs across all groups, he said. Many people wonder how ICE agents, “who are not that well trained, we’ve found out,” plan to differentiate members of the Haitian diaspora or their children.

“Are they going to start harassing people born in the United States that ‘look like they’re Haitians’?” Archbishop Wenski asked, because “that’s going to be something that will cause a lot of disruption in our communities and a lot of destruction.”

Ms. Dieudonne is the child of Haitian immigrants. She has begun carrying her passport card with her at all times, hopeful that it may prevent her erroneous detention as she works in New York’s Haitian neighborhoods.

An ICE spokesperson, in an email to America, declined to explain how the agency planned to proceed in communities with large Haitian populations like New York, Miami and Springfield, Ohio, or if operations around schools and churches would be prohibited. “For operational security purposes, ICE does not disclose information pertaining to operations, including law enforcement plans, tactics or strategies,” the spokesperson said.

More than a million people across the country have already lost or will soon lose Temporary Protected Status. Many have lived for years, even decades, in the United States.

“Temporary means temporary,” the spokesperson said. “TPS was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades. The Trump administration is restoring integrity to our immigration system to keep our homeland and its people safe. We have the law, the facts, and common sense on our side.”

She added: “The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised. Anyone who has been deported received full due process.”

That last assertion has been repeatedly challenged by constitutional and immigration advocates as evidence piles up of mistaken or illegal detentions and deportations.

On Aug. 5, Florida bishops delivered a letter to the state’s senators urging that they support legislation that would extend T.P.S. for Haitian residents, pointing out that conditions in Haiti remain perilous and that because of the dysfunction of the U.S. immigration system even long-term U.S. residents from Haiti have had little success in regularizing their status.

“TPS does not provide an independent basis for adjustment of status,” the Florida bishops wrote. “This leaves families who have been residing in the United States under TPS with very few, if any, options to lawfully remain in the country, no matter how long they have called this land their home, the contribution they have made to its prosperity, or the community and family ties they have established. Only Congress is empowered to create these legal pathways, and such reform is long overdue.”

“We do not ask you to commit yourselves to immigration reform as a rejection of the national interest but as a means of promoting it. Beyond even the positive economic and social contributions made by immigrants, including those in our own state of Florida, the considerations warranting meaningful improvements to our immigration system are profoundly moral in nature,” the bishops wrote. “In order to ‘do things the right way,’ people must first have realistic options available to them.”

Archbishop Wenski perceives a multitude of problems emerging from the ending of T.P.S., including more suffering in Haiti itself. Many family members who stayed behind in what amounts to a failed state at America’s doorstep are completely reliant on remittances sent back home from relatives working in the United States.

What will happen in Haiti when this indirect form of nongovernmental foreign aid ends? Archbishop Wenski asks. School will be starting soon, he points out. Many families were counting on money coming from the United States to pay for school fees and miscellaneous expenses.

And what happens to Haitian residents in the United States who choose to remain but will not be able to legally work now that T.P.S. has ended? They had been parenting and supporting as many as 50,000 U.S.-born children.

The decision to deport Haitians back to the chaos and uncertainty many left behind more than 20 years ago, who now have children, homes and good jobs in the United States, “doesn’t make sense for us, doesn’t make sense for Haiti,” the archbishop said.

In July, Archbishop Wenski joined a small delegation of U.S. and Haitian Catholic bishops who travelled to Washington to urge that the House measure to extend T.P.S. for Haitian residents be brought before the Senate. That lobbying effort was frustrated, he said, by the absence of many Senate Republicans who were attending the funeral of South Carolina’s longtime senator Lindsey Graham.

He did tell Senate staffers that getting the T.P.S. extension through the House “was like a minor miracle, and now we’re looking for a major miracle.” Could it be brought before the Senate and passed with enough votes to make it veto-proof?

“Hope is a theological virtue,” Archbishop Wenski said, “so we can have hope, even though we’re not necessarily optimistic.”

The archbishop even retains some hope that the administration itself can be persuaded to abandon the idea of deporting the hundreds of thousands now eligible for removal because of the T.P.S. expiration. He figures if enough corporate leaders pick up the phone and advise Mr. Trump how disruptive the loss of thousands of health services and restaurant and hospitality workers will be, the president might be willing to accept “Deferred Enforced Departure,” even if he cannot be persuaded to reinstate T.P.S. outright.

He repeated his belief that the president should “take a victory lap” now that he has proved that he can secure the border and pivot to making the economy great again. “He wants the best economy ever, and you’re not going to do that unless you have the labor force participation of these immigrants,” he said.

Ms. Dieudonne urged Haitian and other immigrant families facing the loss of T.P.S. to prepare for the worst if they have not already done so. That means rapidly exploring other immigration statuses they might be eligible for, copying all pertinent family and identity documents and disposing of property while they can.

And many, she added, will have to confront wrenching decisions about what should happen to their children should they be detained by an ICE agent. If they do not have guardians assigned, she warned that their children could end up in foster care systems, and if children do not have passports, they will not be able to accompany parents who are removed to Haiti or another country and may be left behind.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).