The State Department announced Wednesday evening the abrupt cancellation of a program that gave youth fleeing violence in Central America the chance to apply for asylum and join their families in the United States. While the Trump administration had already narrowed the scope of the Obama-era initiative and indicated it would shut it down entirely, the program is being ended with barely a 24-hour notice. Families already in the process of applying had just until midnight last night to get their paperwork filed.

The short window to finish applications “amounts to a cruel willingness to interfere” with the process, said Hans Van de Weerd of the International Rescue Committee in a statement, calling it “sabotage.”

“It’s hard to see how canceling the program directly benefits any U.S. citizen other than the president himself,” said Noah Bullock, director of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal.

The Central American Minors program, or CAM, allowed children who were fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador and had family members legally in the United States to apply for asylum from within their home country. Applicants who didn’t meet the criteria for asylum were also eligible to receive a temporary humanitarian parole that granted them permission to stay in the United States for two years.

CAM was part of the Obama administration’s response to the 2014 arrival of tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children on the southern U.S. border. It was created in an attempt to discourage families from sending their children on the perilous journey north along a route on which migrants are often killed, kidnapped, or assaulted. Most of these children were fleeing threats from gangs, organized crime, and state security forces.

While CAM was limited in scope and slow moving, Lilian Alba, who works with the refugee resettlement agency, International Institute of Los Angeles, said, “There is no question in our mind that this program saved lives.”

As of August of this year, 1,627 youth had been brought to the United States as refugees through CAM. Another 1,465 had come on temporary parole.

Alba said that the entire process had slowed to a crawl in January, when Central American organizations also noticed a freeze. Then, in August, the administration canceled the parole portion of the program. Some 2,700 children who had been approved for parole and were waiting on travel arrangements were told that their acceptance had been revoked.

In an interview in September, Alba said her office was flooded with queries from anxious parents trying to find alternatives to bring their children to safety.

“What’s even worse is that simply to participate in these programs is already putting yourself at risk,” said Joshua Leach, associate for programs, research, and advocacy at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. “You have to leave your home and go to the interview site at conspicuous times of day, you have to hire transportation, and do this repeatedly over the course of the year, drawing attention to yourself. That’s really the perversity here, of the government taking people through this process, acknowledging the danger that they’re in, and then pulling the plug.”

Especially in El Salvador, where the majority of CAM cases originated, it is very hard to hide from threats, said Rick Jones, deputy regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean for Catholic Relief Services.

“People move inside the country first, they try, but they exhaust their options here. These are mostly working-class and poor folks, and where they can afford to go, it’s probably a gang area,” said Jones, who is based in San Salvador. “The [gangs’] ability to track people, and their networks, has really increased.”

Vinicio Sandoval, from the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador, or GMIES, a rights organization that has studied CAM, said most people hid in the homes of family members while waiting for their interviews with U.S. officials. He described the case of a 17-year-old boy who was confined for months in his house because the threats he faced were so severe that he couldn’t go outside. His face lost its color, and there was a permanent indentation in the couch where he sat, day in and day out, in front of the television.

GMIES and other organizations had criticized the lack of publicity within El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala about the program from the U.S. government, even under the Obama administration. In fact, one year after CAM began, not one child had entered the U.S. under the program, the New York Times reported in 2015.

For Leach, the main limitation was that CAM addressed only a sliver of the asylum-seeking population, due to “the fact that the parents have to have status in the U.S., the fact that you are drawing attention to yourself, that it takes a long time, that if your life is in danger you need to be in hiding. In-country processing is fraught with certain dangers.”

Despite these critiques, or perhaps because of them, over time CAM greatly improved, said Sandoval in San Salvador. “It could have been better, definitely. But it established best practices, and it proved that it’s possible to find viable alternatives that offer true solutions.” And Leach’s colleague Amber Moulton said, “We had hoped for an expansion of CAM rather than rescinding or stopping it.”

Without it, the only option for persecuted youth is to flee to another country or try to reach the U.S. border and present themselves there. In the wake of CAM’s cancellation, “the wave of minors being moved through land borders will increase again, and with that, human trafficking for sexual exploitation will increase,” said Guatemalan organizer Guillermo Castillo, who lives in the U.S. and works with the group, Cooperación Migrante. For the children who remain home, it “could mean they will end up being vulnerable candidates for forced recruitment into criminal groups, or facing death if they refuse.”