Immigration advocates worry about Ukrainian deportations

President Donald Trump said earlier this month that he is considering deporting Ukrainians who fled to the United States after Russia invaded their home country in early 2022. Many of the 240,000 Ukrainians arrived as part of Uniting for Ukraine, a humanitarian parole program established by the Biden administration just weeks after the invasion.

Reuters reported last week that Trump was considering terminating the program and revoking the temporary legal status of the Ukrainians it allowed into the United States under humanitarian parole. But administration officials cautioned that Trump has not yet made a decision. Meanwhile, the Justice Action Center is suing the Trump administration for allegedly preventing people brought into the United States through this humanitarian parole program from applying for asylum or work visas that would let them stay in the country longer.

“It is incredibly concerning to us,” Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, told WORLD. His organization has worked with churches to bring thousands of Ukrainians into the United States through the humanitarian parole program.

“The reality is that these Ukrainians came to the country lawfully sponsored either by a family member, in some cases, by a church. And they have been working lawfully,” Soerens said. “Many of them want to go back to Ukraine when it is safe for them to do so, but it, of course, is not safe for them to do so in many cases right now.”

In addition to fleeing war, many Ukrainian Christians from Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine also fled religious persecution by the Kremlin. Protestants make up roughly 4% of Ukraine’s population. For thousands now in the United States, the prospect of returning to that oppression makes a war zone all the worse.

“I’m very connected to the Ukrainian community here in Chicagoland,” Liza Khalil told WORLD. “This is a big, huge fear.” Khalil, who now works as director of case management with World Relief, grew up in Eastern Ukraine under the Soviet Union before moving to the United States.

“The worst fear that a lot of these Ukrainians have, is that if suddenly they’re out of status … What is their choice, really? Where do they go back to?” Khalil said, adding that the situation is worse for Ukrainian Christians whose homes are in Russian-occupied territory. “It is really like sending them back to that oppressor,” she said.

As a child, Khalil lived in Eastern Ukraine—part of the country that is now under Russian control—where her father was an evangelical pastor. He lived under the constant threat of imprisonment.

But he wasn’t the only family member to face persecution. “My sister was all straight As at school,” Khalil said, but added that her sister was only allowed to complete the eighth grade. “She never got a chance to go to college … Education was not available for Christians.”

Russian authorities did not allow parents to bring their children to church, but Khalil’s parents found creative ways to get around the rule. Khalil remembered one Easter Sunday when her Sunday school teachers led her and the other children in playing a game where they tried to sneak into the church basement from outside the building without anyone seeing them.

Khalil said they later learned “the KGB agents were at the gate checking if any parents are with their children.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, interest in Christianity grew in areas of Eastern Europe previously behind the Iron Curtain. During the ‘90s and early 2000s, Khalil served as a missionary in Russia. She witnessed how, after Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Protestants’ religious freedoms in Russia began disappearing. Then, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and other parts of Eastern Ukraine, he brought back Iron Curtain-levels of persecution to those areas.

Such oppression is evident in the Ukrainian territory Russia has occupied in the last three years. Websites like RussiaTorturesChristians.org, run by the same team that runs the U.S.-based nonprofit Ukraine Freedom Project, publish evidence of such mistreatment.

The reality is different outside of Russian-controlled territory. Jeff King, who has worked as president of the nonprofit International Christian Concern for more than two decades, said the “government is not hostile towards Christians.” Christian Concern workers “deal with heavy persecution. And Ukraine overall does not match that. It doesn’t really show up on our radar,” King told WORLD.

Many in the West have asked whether the Ukrainian government has itself oppressed Russian Orthodox practitioners. Khalil explained that those government crackdowns are narrowly tailored against what is essentially a spy agency for the Kremlin. Officials in the Russian Orthodox Church have worked as spies for the Kremlin since roughly the time that Putin came to power, Khalil said, adding that the current head of the Russian Orthodox Church is a former KGB agent with ties to Putin.

In addition to supporting Moscow’s war on Kyiv, the Russian Orthodox Church is more than a religious institution. “The whole identity part is cultural in many ways. So, ‘This is our culture. This is our origin. We are Russian Orthodox.’ So there's very little of the actual faith there. More of a cultural identity,” Khalil said.

Other organizations, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the European Parliament, have also accused the Russian Orthodox Church of working as a weapon for the Kremlin.

Outside of the territories under Russian control, King says Ukrainians sent home from the United States would only be facing the same tough situation that other Ukrainians were already facing. “They’re returning to warlike conditions, not conditions of persecution,” he explained.

“I’m not activated just because we slapped ‘Christians’ on the name, you know? The Christians, or anybody else, they are Ukrainian,” King said. “They might go back to some political persecution because they fled, but that's a completely different deal. So it really comes down to more your view of geopolitics.”

But Soerens argues the opposite. “As Christians, we are called to practice hospitality,” he said. “And that’s not unique to Ukrainians, but it certainly includes Ukrainians who have been forced to flee their homes because of threats of persecution, of violence, and are looking for a safe place.”

Soerens said that a fraction of the Ukrainians World Relief has served since the war began entered the United States as refugees and can remain in the country with that status. But most came in under humanitarian parole and would be at risk of deportation if Trump ends the program.

“The Ukrainians in question … came to the United States lawfully availing themselves to the offer of our country to protect them,” Soerens said. “Our country can decide, potentially, that we don’t want to protect them anymore, but I don’t think that’s what most Americans want.”