Medellin, Colombia – Fraymi Loaiza’s five-year-old daughter, Samantha, was refusing to eat.

Instead, she lay in bed with a raging fever that her mother attributed to an infection she had been battling since before the family left Venezuela in December.

Now in Medellin, Colombia, Loaiza agonised over whether to take Samantha to a local hospital.

She and her family are among the 2.8 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees who have fled to Colombia in recent years, and their immigration papers have yet to be processed.

Without those documents, Loaiza and her children are not yet enrolled in Colombia’s public health insurance programme. She worries they could be turned away at the hospital or charged a fortune for care.

"I don’t know if they’ll see her or how much they would charge me to do some tests," she told Al Jazeera.

Adding to the uncertainty was a broader geopolitical upheaval: the election of United States President Donald Trump.

Upon taking office for a second term on January 20, Trump announced a freeze on the disbursement of foreign aid.

By February 3, Colombia’s government migration agency had been forced to stop processing documents for migrants and refugees, due to the staffing cuts resulting from a lack of funding.

That left families like Loaiza’s in desperate straits, and immigration workers frustrated.

Before the freeze, Adriana Llano Medina was among the volunteers coordinating migration documents and healthcare enrolment for Venezuelan migrants and refugees, through a local nonprofit called Famicove.

Samantha and her younger sister, Clarion, made it on a list of 80 children she was slated to register. When Venezuelan kids do not have health insurance, their lives are at risk, Llano Medina told Al Jazeera.

Many hospitals will not treat undocumented kids until they are in dire need, she explained. "By the time they get to the hospital, they’re already bad."

Llano Medina remembered that, on February 3, WhatsApp messages began to pour into her phone, as dozens of teachers, parents and school psychologists begged for help. But there was nothing she could do.

"Look!" she said, showing Al Jazeera her incoming chats. "My phone can’t take any more messages."