These days, it’s almost as if there are two Donald Trump Presidencies. One is a circus performed daily on Twitter and cable news. The other Presidency, which has to do with policy formulation and implementation, receives less attention, but it is more consequential because it is hurting the welfare of millions of people.

The latest news from Washington is that Trump’s regular workday lasts for just a few hours. According to a report from the political-news Web site Axios, Trump gets to the Oval Office at 11 A.M. every day and leaves by 6 P.M. And, even during these nominal working hours, large periods are allotted for “executive time,” during which he watches television, gabs on the phone, and tweets. On Wednesday, for example, Trump had an intelligence briefing at eleven, and then he had “executive time” until a meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister, at two. The final item on his schedule was a 4 P.M. video recording.

Yet, while the President lolls about the White House watching Fox News, the Administration he heads is busy trying to implement the agenda he has championed. And, now that Trump’s appointees have had almost a year to get the hang of it, they are making progress. One notable area where they are seeing success is the targeting of legal immigrants. Yes, legal.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was cancelling the residency permits of about two hundred thousand people from El Salvador. These people have been living and working in the United States perfectly legally under a program called temporary protected status, which allowed them to come here after a series of earthquakes devastated their country in 2001. These Salvadorans, many of whom now have American children and property, will have until September 9, 2019, to leave the country.

This week’s decision is part of a trend. Late last year, D.H.S. also cancelled the temporary protected status of roughly sixty thousand Haitians and twenty-five hundred Nicaraguans. Around the same time, D.H.S. extended the protected status of about sixty thousand Hondurans—a decision that reportedly infuriated Trump and other White House officials. Congress introduced the temporary-protected-status program in 1990. It allows migrants from nations stricken by natural disasters or civil conflict to stay in the United States for as long as D.H.S. determines that it would be unsafe for them to return home. Previous Administrations, of both parties, routinely extended the protected status for Salvadorans and others, but the Trump White House has ended that practice.

Trump Administration officials are defending the latest move by arguing that El Salvador has “essentially recovered” from the 2001 earthquakes. But anyone vaguely familiar with the Central American country knows that it is still a deeply troubled place, with endemic gang violence and one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Its anemic economy is heavily dependent on remittances from Salvadorans living in the United States, and its government has argued that repatriating large numbers of these migrants would be destabilizing.

It would also be a heartless blow to tens of thousands of hardworking families. According to research by the New York-based Center for Migration Studies, eighty-eight per cent of Salvadorans who have temporary protected status hold down jobs, and many of them have children who grew up in the United States. “We’re pulling the rug out from under them,” Kevin Appleby, an immigration expert at the Center, told HuffPost. “We’ve made a promise to them over a long period of time and all of a sudden they have to sell their houses, they have to take their kids out of school and they have to return to a country that they really do not know and is incredibly dangerous.”

It seems unlikely that Trump and his colleagues will be moved by these arguments. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, initiated the policy shift on temporary protected status when he was the Secretary of Homeland Security. Trump has repeatedly associated immigration from Central America with the Salvadoran gang MS-13. In some parts of the country, such as California and Long Island, police and immigration agents have been arresting and deporting young Salvadorans on suspicion of gang membership, even though, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, these suspicions are sometimes unsubstantiated.

For whatever reason, this sort of repressive activity can’t compete in the daily headlines with Trump’s outrageous tweets or the latest revelation about his behavior. But, even though Trump himself appears to spend much of his time goofing off and spouting off, his minions are far more diligent in targeting some of the most marginalized and defenseless members of society. Amid all the craziness, that should never be overlooked.