From the street, you can hear children at play. Inside the one-story house in Fremont, California, a fish tank gurgles by the front door. A plastic bin filled with Legos sits in the sun room. Renuka Sivarajan, 37, runs a home daycare here. Her path to this point has been like the stock market of late.

When Sivarajan first came to the US from India, in 2003, she worked for a tech company in Phoenix. After she married, she commuted each weekend to the San Francisco area, where her husband worked as an engineer. When she became pregnant with her son in 2007, she moved to California, giving up her job---and work permit. For three consecutive years, she applied for the same work visa that her husband holds, an H-1B. Each year, she was not picked in the random lottery that allocates these visas. She became depressed.

“There would be days when I would be so dull that I wouldn’t even want to play with my child, my own child,” she says. Sivarajan decided to go back to school, completing courses in early childhood education at a local community college. In 2015, after a years-long push from activists, the Obama administration allowed spouses of certain H-1B holders to obtain work permits. Sivarajan opened her daycare. More recently, she thought about expanding outside her home, to a new center. Then, in December, the Trump administration indicated it may eliminate the work permits for spouses.

“There are days when I can’t sleep properly because it bothers me,” Sivarajan says. “It bothers me to think about the future.” Without a job, she worries about holding onto the house, paying bills. She doesn’t know if finances will force the family to move back to India.

“Legally, I’m not allowed to work if I don’t have a work permit, which means all the 16 children whose families who are dependent on me right now, I have to let them all go. They have to find another provider for themselves. My three employees will lose their jobs,” she says. “Thinking about it makes me sad.”

The Trump administration says it plans to soon end the program allowing Sivarajan and more than 100,000 others to work in the US. Called H-4 EAD, or employment authorization document, the permit is available to the spouses of workers on H-1B visas who are in line for permanent US residency. Many tech companies sponsor and apply for H-1B visas, which are given to high-skilled foreign workers, often engineers.

The Obama administration started the program in 2015 partly due to a backlog in the green card process. Because of a per-country cap, people from populous countries such as India and China must wait years before gaining residency. That also meant spouses had been waiting years before they were eligible to work.

When it established the rule, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said the program would benefit the American economy. Last fall, USCIS indicated it was considering revoking the rule as part of President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order.

Shah Peerally, an immigration attorney in Newark, California thinks the government will end the program. “I hope I am wrong, but I think it’s on the way,” he said. The government is still facing a 2015 lawsuit from a group alleging the program is illegal and takes jobs from US citizens. (The group is represented by attorneys from two organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as hate groups.)

The Trump administration initially suggested it wanted to end the H-4 EAD program by February, but recently delayed that plan, saying it needed to conduct a new economic analysis. It now hopes to issue a proposal in June. Peerally thinks the administration has already made up its mind. He predicts that unless a lawsuit bogs down the process, the program “will be gone, basically in the next one or two years.” USCIS said in a statement that it is undergoing a “thorough review of employment-based visa program” and said it has not made a final decision.