According to Polisena, the now-previous owners of the property can still fight to have the title returned.

And officials are already facing a legal challenge.

Owners SCLS Realty LLC and Sixty Three Johnston LLC – or family-owned homebuilding firms whose members are Lucille Santoro, Salvatore Compagnone, and Ralph Santoro – filed a lawsuit against the town in US District Court in Providence on March 10.

They argue their constitutional and civil rights have been “threatened by an outrageous abuse of government powers.” The lawsuit describes the seizure of their property as a “sham taking.”

“The town claims it needs to use eminent domain to build a new municipal campus. But this is false,” the court filing states. “The real reason the town is forcibly depriving the Santoro family of its land is to stop the building of over 250 desperately needed affordable homes.”

Despite the lawsuit, Polisena said he will move forward with plans to build new public facilities on the site and noted officials already put out a request for qualifications.

“I’m very confident in our legal argument,” he said in an interview.

Developers initially proposed plans for the 252-unit, low-and-moderate-income housing complex late last year.

Polisena quickly vowed to “use all the power of government that I have to stop it,” and in January, moved to take the property by eminent domain. The mayor said the site would become home to a new Town Hall and a public safety complex, as the town’s police and fire stations are in disrepair.

To fund the new projects, Johnston will also scrap plans to construct a new high school, and will instead return to its original plans to renovate the existing buildling, he said.

In their lawsuit, the Santoro family, through its attorneys, challenges the notion the town took their land for the purpose of constructing the new buildings, arguing that under the law, the town is prohibited from “concealing or colluding to hide its real reasons for taking the Santoro property.”

“Eminent domain cannot be employed to stop property owners from using their land in legal ways, under the guise of a public use or purpose,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants are abusing the eminent domain power to block affordable housing for low-to-moderate-income families, simply because they don’t want that kind of thing in their town.”

Kelley Morris Salvatore, an attorney representing the family, did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.

Polisena pushed back on the allegations that officials are hiding their true intent. He said he had been looking for a solution for the town’s ailing public safety facilities since after he took office in early 2023, when he succeeded his father, Joseph Polisena Sr., who served as mayor for 16 years.

In January, Polisena said he approached other developers about buying land from them to no avail and only became aware that the property now in question was as large as 31 acres after the developers approached the town with their housing plans in December.

“If I just came up with this municipal complex idea off the top of my head to stop the project, why do I have written correspondence in my email about multiple sites?” Polisena said recently, referring to emails he had from March 2023.

The town even paid to do engineering work on another site, but that property didn’t pan out, he said.

“We said, ‘Let’s put this on the back burner, but we’ll keep it in the back of our mind,’ and then, once this got proposed, like I said, I just put two and two together and said, ‘This could be the spot that we’re looking for,’” he said.

Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.

For Dorcas, it meant an abrupt stop to roughly $1 million in annual funds used to help refugees in their first 90 days in the country, setting them up with housing, cultural orientation, English classes, school enrollment and other assistance. While no more refugees arrived after the stop work order, there were already 65 recent arrivals to Rhode Island who were within their first 90 days in the US, including the family who arrived the day of the order. The refugees came from Central America, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and other countries.

“So there’s no rent money, there’s no food money, there’s no money for them to support them in those first three months,” said Kathy Cloutier, the executive director of Dorcas International Institute, in an interview with the Boston Globe and Rhode Island PBS.

“So that was what was disconcerting,” she said. “It was one thing not to have new refugees coming in. It was another thing to say, wait a minute. We’ve promised these folks this three months worth of assistance, and you’ve just stopped it without any warning and without any reason, frankly.”

The program that was halted, Reception and Placement, is run out of the State Department. Unlike asylum-seekers, who arrive on their own, refugees in the program are selected ahead of time and brought to the US with a promise of federal assistance to settle into a community.

The State Department declined to comment to the Globe about when the program might restart, referring all comment to the White House. The White House did not respond.

But in a court filing on Friday in one of the federal lawsuits over the refugee program’s abrupt halting, the Trump administration indicated it would not be easy to restart refugee resettlement, since contracts with nonprofits have been terminated. It would take “at least three months” just to solicit bidders for new contracts, the Trump administration’s lawyers wrote in the documents.

For Dorcas, which serves roughly 6,000 immigrants a year, the program suspension has already resulted in job cuts. The nonprofit’s 105 employees have been cut down to 92, Cloutier said, through both voluntarily resignations and layoffs since the refugee program stopped.

And there is still other funding that is paused. Funds from the federal Preferred Communities program, from which Dorcas receives $1.5 million a year, remain frozen, Cloutier said. That pot of money is used to help particularly vulnerable refugees who are outside the 90-day window but still need help getting employment or becoming self-sustaining residents of their new community.

“We haven’t been paid for that work since December,” Cloutier said. “And there’s no explanation that we’ve received in terms of why we haven’t been paid. It’s putting a significant strain on us financially.”

The federal money flows to Dorcas through a national nonprofit, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, which also said they haven’t received an explanation for the ongoing pause. The money should have started flowing again following multiple injunctions granted by federal judges in lawsuits against the federal funding freeze, according to Kelci Sleeper, a spokesperson for the national nonprofit.

“Unfortunately, we have no additional insight,” Sleeper said. “The administration is not paying agencies for work completed.”

Cloutier said if all of Dorcas’s federal funding were cut — roughly half of its $11.5 million budget — she would have to reduce the staff to 62 employees. It would have a profound effect on the immigrants they serve, she said..

“This is just a way of putting us out of business,” Cloutier said. “Because if you make us wait long enough, we’re not gonna be able to pay our bills.”

Dorcas also gets revenue from philanthropic donations, and charges some clients a low fee for legal services. Cloutier said the agency was ultimately able to raise private funds for the 65 refugees affected by the initial stop work order.

Cloutier said the agency is not yet seeing mass deportations in Rhode Island, as promised by Trump during the campaign, nor have there been reports in the state of ICE agents entering schools, hospitals, or churches. There have been ICE agents in the state executing individual deportation orders, as there were during the Biden administration.

A Providence police spokesperson said ICE has notified city officials twice so far this year of their “intent to come to the city,” but did not provide specifics and did not ask police for any assistance.

Cloutier said many clients are coming in seeking advice about their immigration status, even if they have a green card.

“We are seeing a lot of fear,” Cloutier said. “The rules are changing, and nobody knows what the rules are anymore.”

If funding to Dorcas is not fully restored, Cloutier said, it will become more difficult for immigrants to be successful learning English, getting jobs, and becoming productive members of society. But she said Dorcas, which was founded in 1921, will adapt to whatever happens.

“We’re in the worst of times,” she said. But we’ve been around for over 100 years and plan to be around for 100 more.”

Watch the interview with Cloutier on Rhode Island PBS Weekly in the video player above, and listen to an extended version on the Rhode Island Report podcast.

Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, a kidney transplant doctor and assistant professor at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital, traveled to Lebanon to see her parents but was prevented from re-entering the United States at Logan airport on Thursday evening.

On Friday, Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the US District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government not to move Alawieh outside the District of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice so that he could consider a habeas corpus petition, which said Alawieh had a valid visa authorizing her entry into the country.

But Alawieh was placed on a flight to Paris on Friday night, and she was later flown back to Lebanon, arriving on Sunday morning, according to her colleagues and lawyers.

Her lawyers filed a notice of apparent violation, claiming the government “had actual notice of this court’s order and willfully disobeyed this court’s order.”

On Sunday, Sorokin ordered the government to answer that claim.

“These allegations are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by an attorney,” the judge wrote. “The government shall respond to these serious allegations with a legal and factual response setting forth its version of events.”

Sorokin gave the government until 8:30 a.m. Monday to respond, and he set a hearing for 10 a.m. Monday at the John J. Moakley Courthouse in Boston.

“In addition,” the judge wrote in his order, “the government shall preserve all of the documents bearing on Dr. Alawieh’s arrival and removal since the issuance of the visa described in the petition including emails and text messages.”

A US Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson, Ryan Brissette, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Alawieh’s colleagues at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital said they were outraged that she had been deported after studying and working in the United States for six years under J-1 and H-B1 visas.

Dr. George P. Bayliss, medical director of Brown Medicine’s organ transplant program, said he hopes the judge will declare immigration authorities in contempt of court and order Alawieh to be returned to the United States.

“I am outraged and upset,” he said. “The government is acting without regard for the courts.”

Plenty of other doctors in Rhode Island have H-1B visas, Bayliss said. “Everyone is at risk,” he said.

The US country has a shortage of kidney doctors, but graduates of foreign medical schools have been coming in on visas to train as nephrologists, Bayliss said. “This has implications far beyond Dr. Alawieh and our division,” he added. “This could worsen the shortage of doctors taking care of people with kidney disease and potentially transplantation.”

Dr. Basma Merhi, medical director of the living donor program and associate medical director of Brown Medicine’s transplant program, described Alawieh as her friend and colleague. “She is an accomplished doctor,” she said. “I don’t know why this should happen to a physician that is very needed and a valuable person to our program.”

The situation is creating widespread anxiety, Merhi said. “If this happened to a doctor serving her patients and helping people and saving lives, it can happen to anybody,” she said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, on Sunday called for the Trump administration to immediately readmit Alawieh to the country.

“Deporting lawful immigrants like Dr. Alawieh without any basis undermines the rule of law and reinforces suspicion that our immigration system is turning into an anti-Muslim, white supremacist institution that seeks to expel and turn away as many Muslims and people of color as possible,” the council said in a statement.

US Representative Gabe Amo, a Rhode Island Democrat, said in a statement that his office has been in contact with local and national lawyers and other members of Congress “to assess the facts surrounding Dr. Alawieh, including the apparent violation of a federal judge’s order.”

Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, said the ACLU is willing to help with legal assistance.

“The idea that somebody who has been lawfully working and living in this country for years can be suddenly whisked away by our government to another country without any semblance of due process would give any person who cares about our democracy pause,” Brown said. “And the fact that it was done in apparent defiance of a court order makes it even more appalling.”

A protest in support of Alawieh has been scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday on the Rhode Island State House lawn.

Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at edward.fitzpatrick@globe.com. Follow him @FitzProv.