A well-educated, hard-working, law-abiding Ukrainian family I know has a story to tell.
Their harrowing escape from their bombed-out, Russian occupied hometown. The months of separation before reuniting in America. The kindness of a family that accepted them into their Utah home. The maze of immigration laws they must navigate. The uncertainty over their future in their adopted country. The faith they have in God.
I spent 3 ½ hours at their dinner table eating a homemade Ukrainian meal and talking in their rented house. But I can’t share what we talked about in any detail. You will never get to know them. You’ll never see what they went through to get here and what they’re going through now.
They’re afraid to share it publicly.
In the current climate where federal agents cast nets in workplaces and neighborhoods for suspected illegal immigrants — sometimes pulling in U.S. citizens — they fear that exposing anything about themselves will jeopardize their immigration status, even though they’re doing everything according to the law. They work and pay taxes. Their children go to public school. They attend a local church.
The family fled to the home of the brave and land of the free to escape the violent oppression Russia imposed on Ukrainians. But they don’t feel like they can exercise all the rights the United States affords its huddled masses.
“When they come here they feel that they have the freedom of speech, freedom to move around, freedom for political asylum. But this is the last place that they would ever think that their rights would be confiscated,” said Aden Batar, director of immigration and refugee services for Catholic Community Services of Utah.
“This shouldn’t be happening in America at all.”
The U.S. government made it possible for these besieged refugees to come here, but it’s not making it easy for them to live here or exercise their rights under the Constitution.
Silencing voices
Brigham Young University communications professor Ed Carter has researched the free speech rights of immigrants and published academic papers on the intersection of immigration and the freedom of expression. Among his graduate degrees is a master’s from Oxford in international human rights law. He practices immigration law on the side and is a former journalist.
The First Amendment, he said, has always been thought of as applying equally to U.S. citizens and noncitizens
“It actually just works as a restriction on the government’s conduct regardless of who they’re dealing with. It could be green card holders, could be undocumented immigrants, could be citizens,” Carter said. “But the point is constitutional rights, including free expression and due process, are supposed to belong to everybody.”
But what he sees now is an era of selective application of constitutional rights. Not every immigrant or undocumented person or legal resident is being targeted but some of them are, he said. And for the ones who are, there appears to be a strategic purpose in making them as high-profile as possible to instill fear in others. Part of that fear relates to their free-expression rights.
“A lot of the migrants or people who came here who have legal status and retain their legal status still are scared because they see what is happening on the news,” Batar said.
“When agents are walking on the streets of neighborhoods, they remember what happened to them in their home countries when they see people with guns on the streets. People will remember the atrocities that happened in their home countries and they don’t feel safe.”
Escaping the war but not the fear
It’s incidents like one at the Salt Lake International Airport last week where plain-clothes ICE agents forcibly detained and removed a woman from the baggage claim area. While conceding she did not know the circumstances, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said it left her “aching from the fear and pain these types of operations keep striking in my heart and the hearts of so many of us.”
“Why did they choose the lobby of the airport — the gateway to our state — where some 28,000 people enter every day?“ Mendenhall said. ”What I do know is that nothing about this incident, like so many ICE operations, makes me feel safer as an American.”
If the mayor doesn’t feel safe as an American amid those incidents, who can blame immigrants, regardless of their country of origin or legal status, for shying away from the public eye?
(ICE issued a statement after Mendenhall’s comments saying agents in a “targeted enforcement operation” arrested a 39-year-old woman from El Salvador who had entered the country illegally in 2007 and was given a “final order of removal in absentia” in 2020.)
As a journalist and as a journalism professor, Carter said he wants people like this Ukrainian family to be open and share their truth and their story.
“I think there’s value to society learning about the circumstances that they’re in. It seems like we’re not going to achieve change unless we can be honest about what’s happening and reach consensus about what we want to change,” he said.
But as an attorney, he said he would have to think about the family’s welfare and would probably advise against revealing their identities just because it does make them a target.
“We’re in this weird era where the administration and by extension it seems like a pretty sizable part of the population is OK with constitutional rights of immigrants being violated,” Carter said. “I personally am not OK with that. But society is becoming more accepting of that.”
Tangled up and blue
This Ukrainian family came to the U.S. along with about 120,000 others under the Uniting for Ukraine program, an initiative the Biden administration launched as a quick alternative to the traditional refugee system to grant humanitarian status for two years. Another 150,000 have come through other channels since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
An estimated 1,000 Ukrainian humanitarian parolees live in Utah, according to the state’s refugee services office. Some have now left the U.S. though the office doesn’t track those numbers.
This past January, the Trump administration stopped accepting new applications and is not renewing residence and work permits. As a result, those who arrived after Aug. 16, 2023, found themselves in the country illegally as soon as their humanitarian permit expired.
On April 3, the father received an email notice of termination of parole from the Department of Homeland Security. The missive opened with “It is time for you to leave the United States” and closed with “Please leave the United States immediately.” Those words cause him heart palpitations.
A day later, he received another email saying the first one was in error. He breathed a sigh of relief but the fear of removal remains.
Recently, his wife was at a store when three men in tactical gear walked in and appeared to be looking for someone. She froze and stopped talking because she didn’t want them to hear her accent.
The family is trying to work through the tangle of immigration laws, looking for stability, but it’s depressing. It’s not that they’re ungrateful or wanting special treatment. They’re just hoping for peace of mind.
Their initial two-year immigration parole was renewed for another two years but it expires again in 2026 for most of the family. They applied — and paid thousands of dollars in fees — for temporary protected status. But there’s no guarantee any the application will be granted.
He applied to have his work authorization renewed in December 2024, well ahead of the expiration date. It took nine months and put him out of a job for a while.
Point of no return
Meantime, the war rages on as Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukraine, bombing hospitals and schools and destroying critical power supplies.
It is not expected that many Ukrainian refugees in the U.S. will return to their homeland any time soon, if at all. The country doesn’t have the infrastructure to support them if they did.
And their lives would be at risk in multiple ways should they set foot in Ukraine again.
This family expects that anyone 18 and older — men and women — would be immediately conscripted in the army, handed a rifle and sent to the front. They probably wouldn’t survive. They know people in that situation who dead within a month.
Even if the war ends, the family has nothing to go back to. Their apartment building is destroyed. Their neighbors are dead. They would be outcasts because they left the country amid the hardship of war. They and their children will be persecuted and bullied.
They have no idea where they will ultimately end up. As the mother said, “We’re totally lost.”
And too scared to talk about it.