Ever since the Trump administration announced in September that it was winding down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, there’s been a ton of confusion about what is actually going on.

Politicians and the press have repeatedly cited March 5 — the date Trump picked in September, as a warning to Congress to finally find a solution for the 690,000 undocumented immigrants protected from deportation under DACA — as an “expiration date” for DACA recipients themselves.

And after the Supreme Court has rejected a highly unusual request from the Trump administration in a lawsuit over their attempt to end the program, many have concluded that DACA recipients are “safe.”

But neither of these is really true, in terms of how DACA actually works. The important dates for DACA recipients themselves are the ones on the work permits issued by the government. They were never going to expire en masse on March 5, and the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t automatically extend them, either.

Now that the deadline Trump said has passed, DACA is anything but safe. But it’s not dead either. The political debate might have moved on, but the clock is still ticking for immigrants themselves.

March 5 represents an inflection point, not an off switch. And the Supreme Court didn’t change that.

The way some people talk about the March 5 “expiration,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that the hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants protected under DACA would all lose their protections — or, worse, that they’d all be rounded up for deportation. But that’s not the case.

Politically, March 5 was important: a clear deadline that President Trump gave Congress to deal with the fate of DACA recipients. It’s all but official that Congress has failed to meet it.

But as policy — in terms of what DACA meant for immigrants — March 5 just marked an inflection point, at which the unraveling of DACA, up to then relatively slow, would get faster.

DACA’s end really started on September 5, 2017, when the Trump administration stopped accepting new applications for the program. From October to March, approximately 122 immigrants each day had their DACA-issued work permits expire because they were unable to apply in time for renewals.

After March 5, that number might be as high as hundreds of immigrants a day. Estimates from the Migration Policy Institute suggest that over the two years starting on March 5, 2018, an average of 915 work permits issued under DACA will expire daily. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data suggests that the pace will start slow, with 425 immigrants losing work permits daily in March, but will pick up aggressively a few months later.

But due to some recent court decisions, it might not end up being that many.

A pair of federal court orders — one issued in California in January, and one issued in New York in February — have slowed DACA’s unraveling by allowing DACA recipients to apply for two-year renewals again. As a result, it’s actually impossible to tell how many immigrants are losing work permits on March 6 — and how many will have new ones that last through March 2020 or later.

The courts have probably kept DACA alive for months — but probably won’t be able to keep it alive forever

In January, a federal judge in California issued an injunction against the Trump administration’s wind-down of DACA, and told US Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) to make a reasonably timely plan to resume accepting renewal applications. The Trump administration is appealing the judge’s order — but because it’s not seeking a stay, there’s no chance for the order to be overturned in the immediate future.

In the meantime, a second judge, in New York, also issued an injunction — meaning that even if one of the two orders got overturned, USCIS would have to keep accepting and processing renewals.

A week before the March 5 “deadline,” the Supreme Court rejected a request from the Trump administration to review the California order directly. Instead, it will go through the normal process, appealing the California order to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which has agreed to expedite the appeal) and presumably appealing the New York order to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Ultimately, it’s probably going to have to go back to the Supreme Court if it wants any hope of getting the California order overturned.

In the meantime, DACA won’t be fully operational as it was before Trump’s September 2017 decision. Unauthorized immigrants who turned 15 after September 5 of last year still won’t be able to apply, and neither will immigrants who would have qualified for DACA but couldn’t afford a $495 application fee (or who didn’t apply for some other reason). But immigrants who had DACA and lost it, or are in danger of losing it, will be able to apply for renewals — and those renewals will, theoretically, be processed and granted normally.

And even if the Supreme Court (or a lower court) fully overturns the judges’ orders and allows the administration to shut down DACA again, the permits it’s handed out in the interim will still be valid.

No matter when exactly DACA is officially closed off (again), it will die slowly, a thousand deaths a day. There won’t be any handy (if artificial) “deadline” to point to as the date that Congress needs to act. Congress will need, if it acts, to somehow act on its own.

What this means for DACA recipients

Here’s how DACA is working right now:

Approximately 122 immigrants each day, from October to March, had their DACA-issued work permits expire because they were unable to apply in time for renewals (after the Trump administration suddenly shortened the application window in September). Some of them have since gotten 2-year renewals.

As many as 534 immigrants are currently set to lose their work permits each day from March 5 to March 31, as of January 31. That pace could rocket up to over 1,000 a day starting in August. But ...

Any immigrant who has a current work permit under DACA — as well as immigrants whose DACA expired after September 5, 2016 — can apply for a two-year renewal (thanks to the court order issued in January). An unknown number of them have already applied.

USCIS has started approving renewal applications and sending out two-year work permits to DACA recipients who applied after the renewal window opened in January. But we don’t know how many of those applications have been approved, or how long USCIS is taking to process applications. Even when DACA was in full swing, USCIS recommended that applicants give them 90 to 120 days to process a renewal application. So it is likely that some DACA recipients are watching their work permits expire while their renewals wait in the processing queue.

As many as 622,000 immigrants have work permits issued under DACA that won’t expire until August 1 or later. At this pace, it would take until February 2019 for more than half of DACA recipients to lose their protections — and that pace doesn’t reflect any of the renewals that could be issued under the court order.

Immigrants whose existing DACA permits have expired haven’t been rounded up en masse by ICE. However, some have been turned over to ICE agents and put in deportation proceedings.

The Trump administration has said clearly that ICE won’t actively target people whose DACA work permits have expired en masse. But it’s said just as clearly that if ICE agents happen to come across immigrants who have lost DACA protections, they’re just as vulnerable to arrest or deportation as anyone else.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been in a state of uncertainty and anxiety since September 2017 — and even earlier, as DACA recipients wondered what President Trump would do to them. Congress still has the power to alleviate that uncertainty. But if it couldn’t do so without the impetus of a deadline, it may feel even less urgency without one.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect estimates from USCIS and the Migration Policy Institute as to the timeline of work permit expirations.