Juan Villacis wakes each morning, looks at the bedroom ceiling and is hit by the sobering realization that he is far from home. Until November, he and his family had carved out a modest life in the Woodhaven neighborhood of Queens, where he and his wife worked as physical therapists while their twin daughters completed college. They are a close-knit family who paid taxes, kept up their house and stayed out of trouble.

And now they are being deported.

Denied political asylum, they are seeing the slow-motion unraveling of their immigrant family. Mr. Villacis, 57, was deported in December to Quito, Ecuador, the country where he was born, but where he has not lived for 31 years. His wife, Liany Guerrero, had been ordered to return to her native Colombia last week — which she and her family fled in 2001 to escape rebel threats of violence and kidnapping — but serious medical issues resulted in her getting a final 30-day extension for treatment of breast cysts and other conditions. Their twin daughters, 22, who came to this country when they were 5, are facing uncertainty given the congressional debate over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, that would allow them to stay and work.

All of this has played out at a time when President Trump has maligned immigrants from Haiti and Africa while sending conflicting messages about what will be done with DACA.

“It breaks my heart that families all over the country are dealing with this,” said Jillian Hopman, the family’s lawyer. “As we’ve seen over the past week with what we thought was going to be reform with DACA, I don’t think Trump knows what he wants. It’s only a political thing to appease his base. But I find it just disgusting and unnecessarily cruel that they’re not looking at any of these people as individuals.”