Richard Minard of Bow is the executive director of Building Community in New Hampshire, whose mission is to help refugees and other immigrants navigate their way to safe, healthy, productive, prosperous, and connected lives.

Scores of New Hampshire employers have hired New Americans from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Haiti and now everyone is nervous. Are those employees on the president-elect’s hit list? Will they be deported, even though they entered this country with the government’s blessing? They have formal “employment authorization documents” (EADs) and Social Security numbers making it legal for them to work and pay taxes.

What they don’t have is green cards, permission to live in the United States for the rest of their lives.

The legal term for their immigration status is “humanitarian parolee.” I don’t use that term much because non-lawyers assume that a parolee must have been released from prison. That’s wrong. The United States welcomed thousands of humanitarian parolees from Afghanistan after that nation fell to the Taliban. The parolees had served America and were at risk of murder or deportation by the Taliban. The parolees have EADs. Some are cleaning floors at New Hampshire schools and hospitals; some are making parts for Navy submarines; at least one is a geologist helping communities develop their water systems.

When Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, the U.S. State Department blessed the “Uniting for Ukraine” system of allowing American families and organizations to host Ukrainians in their homes. New Hampshire residents volunteered to host more than 1,000 individuals, all of them admitted to the United States as humanitarian parolees with a two-year authorization to work and pay taxes. For many, those two years are up, and they are nervous. Will their requests for extensions be granted? Or will the next administration make them “go home,” even if their apartments were bombed and Russia still occupies the cities?

The most recent group of humanitarian parolees are people who fled the violence and chaos of Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, but especially Haiti. They are here legally: “documented,” working, paying taxes, and extremely nervous. Haitians fear that they will be among the first to be deported because they are Black and lack a political constituency.

The businesses and institutions across New Hampshire that hired these parolees are finding them valuable employees who help them build their products and serve their clients. The employers are nervous, though, because they fear that this deportation frenzy might deplete their workforce.

The organization I manage, Building Community in New Hampshire, is a nonprofit based in Manchester that has helped scores of employers recruit and hire hundreds of New Americans, all of them with employment authorization documents. Those jobs have strengthened New Hampshire’s economy and those employees have enriched our communities.

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But now I am nervous.

I fear that employers, anticipating a wave of deportations, may stop hiring New Americans out of concern that they will be short-term employees at best. I fear that employers and community leaders will also discriminate against people who have come to New Hampshire as refugees, an immigration status that normally does convey lifetime residence in the United States.

New Hampshire’s employers need not become the victims of this movement, but we must use our influence with elected local and state officials to protect our workers and the families they support.