Ezequiel Wilbur of Omaha, 24, has had a rugged couple of years. A fight with a family member landed him in jail. Once he got out, he struggled to readjust and started using drugs.

“I was just rotting away in my bed every single day, high out of my mind. So I signed up to come to Job Corps because I thought of it as a way out,” he said.

Wilbur has been living at the Pine Ridge Job Corps Center in Chadron, Nebraska, for six months now.

He said he’s sober and is in an apprenticeship program for painting. He’s actually calling from a job site.

“So right now, we’re working for an elderly woman in town,” he said — painting her house for minimum wage and racking up on-the-job hours he needs to graduate.

The Job Corps was founded in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It gives low-income, disadvantaged youth a place to live and intensive job training in trades like construction and car repair.

But right now, nearly 100 Job Corps centers around the country are in a state of limbo while a federal judge weighs whether the Trump administration can freeze operations at those centers. And the Job Corps center where Wilbur is is on the list targeted for closure.

“It would be devastating,” he said. “I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”

Wilbur said he’d probably end up living out of his car in his old neighborhood.

The Trump administration says costs for the residential Job Corps program are too high; it spends $80,000 on the average trainee.

“Because it’s so intensive, it’s also very expensive,” said economist Burt Barnow, who studies workforce training programs at George Washington University.

Plus, he said research on the program’s outcomes is mixed. Teenagers who go through the program don’t seem to do better on the job market than their peers who don’t.

But, “the older people who go into the job corps — typically 20 to 24 — actually do have sustained earnings gains from the program,” he said.

To make sure taxpayers are getting their money’s worth, Barnow said the Trump administration could narrow the Job Corps program’s focus to those older students rather than scrapping it.

The federal government doesn’t have much else to offer this group, noted Alfonso Flores-Lagunes with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

“It is a very difficult population to serve, but I think that the worse option is just leaving them behind,” he said.

If these centers shut their doors, that would also impact the communities that host them, particularly in rural areas.

Jodi Mitchell is with the Bitterroot Valley Chamber of Commerce in western Montana.

“The firefighting that they help with is the biggest piece,” she said.

Students at the nearby Trapper Creek Job Corps Center help prevent and suppress wildfires and maintain hiking trails — crucial work that keeps the region’s tourism economy afloat.