Thousands who fled to safety in America are now caught in immigration limbo. Will they be forced to return home?
Until last month, Larysa Atamas did not know where she and her 9-year-old son would go once their time in the U.S. was up in April. What she did know was that going back to the city they once called home—Kharkiv, Ukraine—was not an option.
Other refugees, like Maria , recalled her story through tearful sobs."We were hoping to stay as close to the Ukrainian border as possible—in case there was any way we would be able to turn around and go back," she said."But it became increasingly obvious that that wasn't going to happen." "The 10 months that we've been in the U.S. have not been an easy 10 months, but they have not been nearly as psychologically damaging as the two weeks we spent in Hungary," Maria said. Her parole ends April 23, 2023.There has been little attention brought to parolees because most Ukrainians who came to the U.S. aren't facing the imminent possibility of being forced to leave. More than half arrived in the U.S.
For Oleksii and Natalia Vashchenko, who have already been forced to travel tirelessly, asking for a parole extension would have involved a trip from Springfield, Massachusetts, to San Diego, California, with their teen son. Upon landing in Mexico City, they were taken to Cancun and bussed to the border, where"welcoming" CBP officers processed them through humanitarian parole. But on April 19, Natalia and her son's parole will end.
Recognizing the complexities of the immigration paths that Ukrainians have used to enter the U.S., the DHS bureaus have already agreed to share authority and transfer jurisdiction when a case warrants. The obstacle is logistical: transferring thousands of immigrants who have only interacted with Customs and Border Patrol into a new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services system.
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