They are nurses, mechanics, sanitation workers and executives. They’ve fallen in love, bought houses and raised children. They’ve opened restaurants and construction companies, paid taxes and contributed to Social Security, living and working legally in the United States since 1999.

Now more than 50,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans stand to abruptly lose their legal status as the Trump administration seeks to end their protections, in place since the Clinton era, under the temporary protected status program, or TPS. Amid a broader campaign to crack down on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security said that because “conditions have improved” in Honduras and Nicaragua, it is ending the program for natives of those countries in early September.

The decision, announced in early July, has been met with outrage from immigrant communities across the country, prompting a lawsuit by the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group, and seven impacted individuals. The parties allege that the decision violated federal law by “relying on a predetermined political decision” and “racial animus,” while ignoring “dire” local conditions in those countries. Immigration advocates hope federal courts will step in to intervene. But in the meantime, the order has left tens of thousands of people grappling with the possibility that they will be forced to leave their families and U.S.-citizen children to return to countries where they have no immediate family, no community, no jobs - places that in some cases they haven’t seen in nearly three decades.

“My life has been here in the Bay Area,” said Jhony Silva, 29, a certified nursing assistant from Honduras, who is suing the Trump administration for ending the program. His parents brought him to the United States as a toddler in 1998.