'It's not just Ukrainians - American employers are concerned,' one US lawyer said
A Ukrainian woman in the US is living in fear that her family will be sent back into the path of Russian bombing by Donald’s Trump plans to revoke refugees’ immigration status.
Veronika McCann, 31, said she had been having “panic attacks” following reports that Trump was considering revoking the temporary legal statuses for an estimated 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion.
Ukrainian refugees in the US share a similar status to those from Haiti and Venezuela known as “temporary protected status”.
Trump’s administration is seeking to strip legal status from more than 1.8 million migrants allowed to enter the US under temporary humanitarian parole programmes launched under the Biden administration, sources told the Reuters news agency.
Ms McCann has lived in Martinsburg, West Virginia since 2015. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, her mother, Oksana Porplenko, and two younger sisters, Mariia, 22, and Anna, 14, fled Ukraine to join her.
Although her mother received a green card through family reunification, Mariia was given Temporary Protected Status, and Anna came on Ukrainian Humanitarian Parole.
Ms McCann feels “frustration and anger” hearing of Trump’s proposed plans to revoke temporary legal statuses and deport Ukrainians, and says several Ukrainian families she knows in the US have voiced fear at being forced to return to Ukraine.
Ms McCann, back, with her mother and sisters
“It makes me feel sick,” she said. “It feels like he [Trump] is siding with the devil, Putin, to remove Ukrainians. As much as I am proudly American, I still have my Ukrainian roots. My heart has always been with Ukraine. It hurts a lot to see all this happening.”
Her family did not come from “peaceful parts of Ukraine”, she said, but were from the outskirts of Kyiv, which has been targeted by drone and missile attacks since the early days of the war.
“My family survived complete hell,” she said. “I’m so thankful they’re alive. My mother was walking to her job when bombs started falling pretty much in front of her.”
If Trump follows through with his plans to revoke legal status, she is scared of what Mariia and Anna will have to return to.
“They would just have to go back right under the bombs,” she said. “We don’t have any relatives in Europe. They can stay with my dad and grandparents in Ukraine. It is noisy and dangerous there. There is no way of knowing that a bomb will be dropped on our apartment. My mother’s family are in territories that has been occupied by Russians.”
Ms McCann has spent countless hours working to secure long-term status for her two sisters. “Immigration law is so complicated,” she said. “We have to wait years for the adjustment of status. The paperwork, including employment authorisation, is ridiculously expensive. No matter what you do or how hard you try, it’s not enough. It’s just wrong.
“We just keep facing all these extra expenses with broken immigration law in this country,” she said. “We are having panic attacks. What’s going to happen? Will they have to go back to Ukraine under the bombing?”
‘It’s not just Ukrainians – American employers are concerned’
Iryna Mazur, an immigration lawyer based in Philadelphia, called the decision “very, very troubling” and said she had been “bombarded” by phone calls, not only from panicked Ukrainians but from American employers.
“I’ve been bombarded by phone calls since two minutes after the news story was published. My clients are extremely scared. They’re afraid of uncertainty, afraid their status will be revoked. Afraid how they will feed their children, how they will work,” she said.
Ms Mazur is a board member of the Ukraine Immigration Task Force, a nonprofit created after the invasion to help provide information for Ukrainian refugees.
“I’m also being called by American employers who employ 20, 60, 100 people from Ukraine,” she said. “Ukrainians have specialised skills, it’s American employers who are extremely concerned. Somebody called me and said he has 60 Ukrainian employees. It’s a huge concern because that would hit American business’.
Ms Mazur said she had clients ranging from families to single people who had to flee the bombardment back home.
“They have nothing left of their homes, they literally have nowhere to go,” she said. She represents people from Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine which was levelled by Russian troops in the early days of the war.
“Others are from areas that are under Russian control. Those people have nowhere to go, they came here, they got a job and are law-abiding residents.”
But the problem was that the Uniting For Ukraine (U4U) programme they were allowed into the US on was not the work of Congress, but at the discretion of the Biden administration.
Ms Mazur said that when Trump came into office, he announced on day one that all programmes such as U4U would be reviewed and the review was supposed to last 90 days.
But instead, changes are happening sooner than planned, including an order last month from Homeland Security pausing all applications filed under U4U. That includes applications from people trying to get to the US, and from people already there.
Ms Mazur said: “For Ukrainians who fled the war, their fate is in the political will of the current administration. We hope they will understand the consequences if their parole [status] would be terminated. It would be devastating to many people who have nowhere to return to.
“Their homes have been destroyed, their country is an active war zone, to pull the status from those people would leave them in severe distress.
“I cannot believe the administration will do this. Can they do it? Yes. But I hope they won’t.”