Alfredo Orellana, 31, was not just a caregiver for Luke Ferris, a 28-year-old with severe autism. The pair worked out at the gym, got tacos and played video games together. They exchanged elbow bumps.

“It’s like Luke got a bro to hang out with,” said Ferris’ mother, Lena, from their home in Falls Church, Virginia.

Then suddenly, after four years, Orellana, who goes by Alex, was gone, locked up in an immigration detention center nearly 2,000 miles away.

A permanent U.S. resident, or green card holder, Orellana is facing deportation for trying to swindle a store out of $200 eight years ago when, his wife said, he was struggling with substance abuse.

The detention of Orellana and other green card holders is the latest sign that the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration is expanding far beyond people who are in the country illegally. Tasked with fulfilling President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportations, federal agents have been detaining permanent U.S. residents convicted of years-old minor offenses and moving to deport them.

Their families are reeling, as are some of the people they work for, like the Ferrises, who had come to rely on, and even cherish, Orellana’s care for their son.

Lena Ferris recently flew to Texas to visit Orellana, who is being held at the El Valle detention center there.

“How could anyone support getting rid of an amazing person providing a vital service to an American?” asked Ferris, who noted that her son’s care — and thus Orellana’s salary — is covered by Medicaid.

A labor shortage looms over the fast-growing industry that provides care to senior and disabled Americans, and immigrants such as Orellana have been a key source of workers.

But under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has taken a sprawling view of who should be targeted for deportation. A DHS document reviewed by The New York Times said that Orellana was subject to removal from the United States for obtaining $200 “by false pretenses.”

Under immigration law, that constitutes a crime involving “moral turpitude” that can place a green card holder at risk of deportation.

At the time of his trouble with the law, Orellana was in his early 20s and abusing drugs. After being convicted, he went to rehab. He became a peer supporter to others in recovery and found a calling caring for developmentally disabled people, according to his wife and employer.

Green card holders convicted of certain crimes can be deported. But the government has usually opted not to target those people unless they have committed particularly serious crimes, according to legal experts.

Orellana’s lawyer, Ben Osorio, compared arresting green card holders like his client to ticketing people for driving 5 miles over the speed limit, and fining everyone who jaywalks. “We are living in an era of maximum enforcement,” he said.

Having a green card is a necessary step toward citizenship. As of 2023, there were 13 million green card holders in the United States. About 9 million of them were eligible to become citizens, because they had been permanent residents for at least five years or had been married to a citizen for three years.

But many green card holders opt not to pursue citizenship. The application is expensive and the process is bureaucratic, requiring interviews with federal officials, extensive paperwork and a civics exam. Now, though, the difference between legal “permanent” residency and citizenship has become strikingly clear to many green card holders.

“It is an erroneous expectation that you are guaranteed to be here indefinitely when you have a green card,” said Gerald L. Neuman, an immigration scholar at Harvard Law School.

Green card holders concerned about being ensnared in the same dragnet as Orellana and others have flooded lawyers with queries. Several lawyers said they had been advising those with even minor offenses on their record to avoid international trips. Many of those people had traveled abroad without any problem before Trump took office, the lawyers said.

Erlin Richards, a green card holder since 1992, was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic last month when he was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York, based on a 2006 conviction for marijuana possession in Texas. He had paid a fine and never spent a day behind bars, said his lawyer, Michael Z. Goldman.

In the two decades since he was convicted, Richards, 43, an electrician from the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent who has three U.S.-born children, said that he had been to Canada and his home country. But that was before Trump entered office.

In a phone interview from immigration detention in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he said that a federal officer at JFK suggested that he had no discretion to let him go. “Haven’t you been watching the news? Trump is president now. We have to detain you,” Richards recalled being told. His lawyer, Goldman, pointed out that “he’s locked up for carrying a substance that is legal in many states, including his home state of New York.”