Advocates for the detainees said they had been told for weeks that deportation officers in Florida were waiting for senior officials in Washington to set a policy for the group. Most were ordered deported in February, but are eligible for release under an order of supervision until deportations resume.

“Their prolonged and unnecessary detention is only exacerbating their trauma,” the advocates wrote to the agency on March 19, after receiving no response to detailed, individual requests for release by two dozen of the detainees. “There is no reason to spend taxpayer dollars detaining traumatized earthquake survivors who cannot be deported and who have demonstrated that they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community.”

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn. Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

“Every time I called immigration, they told me they will release them in two or three weeks, and now it’s almost three months,” said Mr. Ulysse, a retired carpenter and architectural designer who said he had always warned his relatives in Haiti not to come illegally on boats, but to wait for a green light from the United States.

On March 11, Reagan was abruptly transferred, and for days his younger brother did not know where he was. It turned out he had been taken to the Baker County jail, in Macclenny, Fla., six hours away. On Tuesday evening, a paralegal found him there in shackles, about to be transferred again; guards, following government protocol, would not say where.

“His brother is far away — he’s waiting, waiting,” Mr. Ulysse said of Jackson. “He started to cry on the phone. It’s very terrible.”