On Monday night, Kevin Sieff of the Washington Post offered a look at some of the people Trump’s refugee ban is keeping America safe from:

They were deemed the most vulnerable cases: refugees suffering from medical conditions so ­severe that normally their journeys to the United States would be expedited.

One is a 9-year-old Somali child in Ethiopia with a congenital heart disease that cannot be treated in a refugee camp. Another is a 1-year-old Sudanese boy with cancer. A third is a Somali boy with a severe intestinal disorder living in a camp that doesn’t even have the colostomy bags he needs.

After President Trump’s executive order last week, their resettlement in America was put on hold. Now, the organization responsible for processing refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, Church World Service, says that order could be their death sentence.

As Sieff writes, the United Nations announced Monday that roughly 20,000 people in such condition are banned from entering the United States for the next four months. For many, Sieff points out, this is more than a mere delay—refugees who were prepared to move to the United States have already given up their shelters and supplies at their former camps:

They would be treated as new arrivals—often sent to crammed communal tents, waiting all over again to receive a card that entitles them to food rations. In Kakuma, [Kenya], those rations were halved in December, as humanitarian organizations ran low on money as they struggled to respond to the global refugee crisis.

Because many of the refugees’ U.S. clearances will expire during the 120-day suspension, it could take them “months or even years to get to complete the process again,” [Church World Service senior director Sarah] Krause said.

Some of the most ill refugees may be admitted to other countries for treatment. Some could plausibly be admitted into the United States on a case-by-case basis should the Trump administration take an interest in saving them. But some, inevitably, will die.