And in New Jersey, parents were pulling away from SNAP and WIC, a program designed to improve the health outcomes of the country’s most vulnerable infants and children, said Carlos Rodriguez, the executive director of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties. “I strongly worry that this is going to start increasing food insecurity,” he told me. “I worry about the immediate and long-term consequences on the health, nutrition, and school performance of the youngest members of these families. And in most cases, we’re talking about citizens.” He continued, “If this starts happening at any kind of scale, we can’t close the gap in terms of the meals that this will remove from families.”

Immigrants themselves said that the message from the Trump White House was clear, with some adding that nothing was worth the risk of deportation. Marie Cruzado Jeanneau, who came to the United States from Peru as a child and is currently shielded from deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, has an undocumented mother and younger siblings who are citizens. “We’re so scared to see my mother leave the house for work,” she told me. “We go out less. We drive less. She won’t go in a government building. She hides in the back of the car.” Her mother had stopped taking the kids into school, she added.

As social workers and service providers started to witness mothers and fathers pulling back from the safety net after Trump’s election and inauguration, they rushed to set up meetings with immigration-law experts. National organizations have struggled to advise local entities what to tell their clients. Another challenge: getting through to anyone in Washington. There is no secretary of agriculture or SNAP administrator in place, after all, nor is it clear who, if anyone, is managing anti-poverty efforts in the White House. “Who do we call?” said one nonprofit worker, who asked for anonymity to criticize the Trump administration openly. “You tell me who we call about this.”

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

As of now, there have been no policy changes altering safety-net eligibility standards. But social-justice organizations said that Trump’s racist attacks on Mexicans and broad anti-immigrant stance had resonated in communities of color and of immigrants. “The administration says that it’s going to go after the ‘bad dudes,’” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro of the National Council of La Raza, the civil-rights organization. “You’re seeing all these cases of people—children, documented immigrants, Hispanic and Latino citizens—who are not ‘bad dudes’ caught in this dragnet. That’s adding to the climate of confusion and fear. This is not accidental.”

And there have been some signs that the White House might make changes to block mixed-status families’ access to the safety net. A draft executive order on public-charge rules leaked to Vox would make families more vulnerable to deportation if they used benefit programs. “The message is: If you’re sponsoring a family member, you better be prepared to take care of them,” said Audrey Singer of the Urban Institute, the Washington-based think tank. “Because we, the United States government, are not going to take care of them.” In that case, poverty, including deep poverty, could increase significantly.