Christian Afghans who sought asylum from persecution by the Taliban in the United States are being told they must leave immediately or be deported.

The news came in an email to a group of migrants living legally in north Raleigh.

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"I have never, never imagined United States one day say you should leave this country," said one man who asked WRAL News not to share his name.

Apostles Church in Raleigh has welcomed about 25 people who came to the U.S. after the Taliban took over.

"It is normal I feel not being safe in Afghanistan," the man said. "It is normal to not feel not being safe in Iran or Pakistan, but I've never imagined to feel not be safe in America."

He is one of tens of thousands of immigrants who had been allowed to temporarily live and work in the United States under the Biden administration.

In recent days, all have received a seemingly unequivocal message from the Department of Homeland Security.

This Raleigh resident and others got an email.

"Your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice," the man read. "If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions."

The termination notices, which started being delivered electronically last week, were more indication that migrants who followed the rules set by the last administration may be among the most vulnerable now as President Donald Trump seeks to make good on his campaign promise of mass deportations.

Many migrants who entered the country using the CBP One app — introduced in 2023 to bring order to the chaotic influx at the Southwestern border — have been told their legal status would end seven days after the date on their notice. If they failed to depart voluntarily, they would be targeted for enforcement and deported, the notices said.

In Raleigh, the man who spoke to WRAL News said he had a court date scheduled, a hearing on his asylum application for May 13.

"The judge will decide, should I stay or should I go," he said.

Apostles Church Pastor Nick Comiskey says the church has organized resources to help asylum seekers navigate the process.

"It struck a chord within me and truly within so many people in our church, because it's a very personal issue. These are individuals, men, women, children that we know and have come to know and love," Comiskey said.

The congregation fears that if their new friends have to return to Afghanistan, it may be a death sentence.

"If we go back to Afghanistan, we are not safe," the man said. "It is, it is like we are signing the suicide mission for ourselves."

At least 10 immigration lawyers, most of whom are U.S. citizens, said that they, too, had received the notices urging them to depart the country, possibly because of a glitch linking their email addresses to the immigration documents of their clients.

Despite a few high-profile roundups of immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally by federal law enforcement, the new wave of notices indicates that the bulk of “removals” by the administration is likely to come from the revocation of immigrants’ legal status, not, as Trump promised, the large-scale deportation of criminal migrants.

The latest hit came last week when the Trump administration ended temporary protections for more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. That followed last month’s revocation of a Biden-era program that permitted around 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to stay for two years with work permits, provided they had a financial sponsor and passed a security check. The cancellation, to go into effect April 24, is being challenged in federal court in Boston.

On Monday afternoon, the same federal judge in Boston, Indira Talwani, moved to temporarily block the Trump administration’s planned effort to revoke the temporary status of migrants who came to the country as part of a Biden-era program.

In a statement, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said U.S. Customs and Border Protection had sent out the parole revocation notifications to the email addresses provided by immigrants, meaning that some “notices may have been sent to unintended recipients.”

Nicole Micheroni, an immigration lawyer in Boston, said, “The language is very aggressive and very threatening, so I could see this email causing a lot of panic and concern to people, whether they are citizens or here on parole or here legally in any other way."

Billy Husher Jr., another U.S. citizen and lawyer who received the notice, said that it was “just a mass email and not any kind of individualized determination.” Husher, a senior associate at Costas Law Firm in Independence, Ohio, added, “This makes me believe that it’s just a scare tactic to make people give up their due-process rights.”

The move to terminate the status of people who used the app is part of a wider push by the Trump administration to roll back discretionary programs created by the Biden administration, which had allowed about 1.5 million people to be “paroled” into the country.

The parole status shielded immigrants from deportation and granted them employment authorization for two years.

The Homeland Security Department canceled CBP One after Trump took office, and turned it into a “self-deportation” app, CBP Home, which it hopes migrants will use to prove they have left the United States once they have departed. The administration has also effectively canceled Social Security numbers that immigrants had obtained legally to cut them off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards and raise pressure on them to leave.

The New York Times contributed to this article.