Temporary Protected Status has expired for more than 300,000 Haitians and Syrians, leaving thousands in New York and around the country vulnerable and unmoored after sometimes decades here, all to please Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant zealotry.

We know what isn’t going to happen: these people are not going to just up and leave lives they’ve spent years building here with the express permission of Uncle Sam. Now that the government has changed its mind, it doesn’t have anywhere close to the capacity to remove them, either, despite its best (and most authoritarian) efforts.

Instead, hundreds of thousands of these folks will continue to live and work in the country as our friends and neighbors, but now without work authorization or protections from deportation, in more dangerous and itinerant lives.

So now those who have been fully legal and taxpaying cabdrivers, nurses, teachers, small business owners and more, will be forced instead into underground, less-regulated industries and jobs where they will be more susceptible to abuse and under-payment and unable to use skills they’ve acquired that are in many cases desperately sought after.

Many will likely come to fear all authorities, making all of us less safe as the concern over the ever-present specter of detention and deportation comes to override the desire to report crimes, cooperate in investigations and make issues known to, for example, housing and health inspectors.

No matter how fervently the GOP has oriented itself around anti-immigrant sentiment in the last two decades, these remain practical issues that even other Republicans can see, which is why GOP legislators are among those begging Trump to rethink this.

As we’ve seen, it takes a lot for Republican elected officials to defy the king, which makes it all the more striking that they’re doing so here on one of his red-meat issues (albeit one where Trump’s public credibility has tanked, just as it has everywhere else).

In any case, it really shouldn’t be the White House’s decision at all. This all as the result of the administration ignoring the law with the blessing of the Supreme Court. It was clear from the start that the decisions to end TPS status had already been made before the internal process had even begun, as evidenced not just by the fact that neither the first nor second Trump administrations have ever decided to renew a TPS designation but by their own public, explicit, often racist tirades against the program and its participants.

The law itself — the will of Congress, if such a thing still exists — mandates that these decisions be made after careful consideration by experts at DHS who can determine whether country conditions remain too dangerous to send people to. The State Department certainly thinks such conditions exist; it maintains travel advisories for Haiti and various other countries that Trump is trying to strip TPS from.

There are some last-ditch legal efforts to preserve TPS, but whether or not they succeed, New York State and City — along with states around the country — should make efforts to mitigate the potential damage, providing services to those affected. These should include legal help that could net some of these people other statuses, whether asylum or employment-based residency or whatever else. Many might be eligible but just not have the resources to pursue these claims, and these investments will pay off in multiples for New Yorkers.

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