Inha Ruda and her family have found stability in north suburban Niles.
Some 4,900 miles and two years removed from the relentless Russian bombing of their hometown of Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, Ruda’s 7-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son have made friends at school. She and her husband have found steady jobs. Most importantly, they’ve escaped the din of artillery shells and the uncertainty of war.
But they don’t know how much longer that stability will last. Like many of the 40,000-plus Ukrainians who have arrived in Chicago since Russia invaded their homeland, Ruda and her family entered the U.S. on a temporary humanitarian parole status that President Donald Trump is considering revoking.
That means Ruda’s family might have to start all over again, putting their future in limbo over the next 18 months as they consider returning to a war-torn country or finding refuge in a new country.
“It’s making me crazy. It seems unbelievable for me,” Ruda said at the Selfreliance Association on the Northwest Side, the Ukrainian-focused resettlement agency where she now works.
“It’s hard to imagine how we’ve started step by step, getting documents, finding jobs, everything new. We finally have safety, schools, everything good, and then somebody makes a decision that everything stops and now you have to go,” she said. “It’s difficult.”
Others could lose their legal status even sooner — perhaps as early as May — if Trump shuts down temporary protections issued by former President Joe Biden that have allowed 240,000 Ukrainians fleeing the war to come to the U.S.
The deportation threat has loomed for Ukrainians — and many other immigrant groups — since Trump issued an executive order the day he was inaugurated requiring the Department of Homeland Security to wind down many parole programs.
That stress was ratcheted up last week as Trump — who has blamed Ukraine for the war and reversed generations of U.S. foreign policy in warming up to Russia for peace talks — acknowledged he’s considering wiping out the Biden-era legal status that has welcomed many Ukrainians here.
“There were some people that think that’s appropriate, and some people don’t, and I’ll be making the decision pretty soon,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “But we’re not looking to hurt them.”
The uncertainty is already hurting many Ukrainians, according to Walter Tun, executive director of the Selfreliance Association.
“Everyone’s scared to death. No one knows what’s going to happen, so it’s just anxiety and mental anguish,” Tun said.
The Trump administration previously paused applications to the federal Uniting for Ukraine program, a separate, streamlined humanitarian program that allowed Ukrainians displaced by the war to settle with sponsors in the U.S.
“These are not people who are abusing the system. These are people who have family or associates vouching for them. These are people with work authorization, who are paying taxes and acculturating to our society,” Tun said.
“Most of them are very reluctant to go back to Ukraine, because in many instances, they don’t have homes to go back to. The economy’s in ruin. There are no jobs to go back to,” he said.
Earlier in the war, Ruda, 37, wanted to return to Ukraine. Her teenage son still longs to go back “and meet his friends and live the life that he remembers,” she said.
“But this can’t be. I explained that this will never happen because it’s not for him. It’s not the best choice,” Ruda said, dreading the thought of her son or husband being pressed into military service.
Angela Savenko also dreamed of returning to the pre-war life she built with her husband and two young children near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Leaving in the first place was hard, “but when you see your kids in the bomb shelter, it could be like a click of your fingers and they could die. I couldn’t risk my kids anymore.”
Savenko’s family came to Chicago about a year ago as refugees. Returning to their homeland, where her parents live just a few miles from a rapidly shifting front line, isn’t an option, she said.
For the first few months in Chicago, whenever Savenko’s children heard police sirens, they’d ask her to take them to a bomb shelter. In Ukraine, air raid alarms signaled incoming Russian missile attacks.
“I’ve seen my kids start healing from the war,” Savenko said of her sons, 5 and 7. “They’ve become calm, cheerful, they can joke and play again. They tell me, ‘I feel happy here.’”
“The environment here is really supportive, and we really appreciate the hospitality of American people. You’re very supportive and you’ve tried to comfort people and we didn’t meet that in other places,” Savenko said. “It has meant we can sleep through the night without being afraid of drones and missiles. And we can explain to our kids that we’re in a safe place.”
Yuliia Oleksiichuk, a Ukrainian who moved to Chicago about four months ago on temporary protected status, had to pull out of medical school where she was studying ophthalmology before her family decided to flee Lviv. Now she’s an intake specialist at the Selfreliance Association.
“It’s stressful, emotional because my future depends on it. I’m building my life here and it’s important for me to have a stable status,” she said.
While their futures may be uncertain, Ukrainians in the Chicago area may end up with more protection than those in other parts of the country, according to Mariya Dmytriv-Kapeniak, president of the Illinois division of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
She said immigration advocates have been preparing for possible deportations since the presidential election — and she’s most worried about Ukrainian refugees in cities without sanctuary policies like those in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois that limit cooperation between local police and federal immigration authorities.
The Trump administration is suing the state over those policies, while congressional Republicans last week grilled Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic sanctuary city mayors on Capitol Hill.
But Dmytriv-Kapeniak said she knows what Ukrainian refugees are running from — her friends have died fighting back Russian incursions, and many of her classmates from medical school are still on the front lines.
“In other states, in other cities, it’s hard to say what could happen to those families,” she said. “They’re seeking refuge from death and destruction, to be able to send their kids to school without hearing air raid sirens.”
Now it’s a matter of educating Ukrainians on their legal rights if federal agents should end up knocking on their door, Dmytriv-Kapeniak said. Immigration advocates have canvassed Latino communities in Chicago with information on how to interact with Immigration Customs and Enforcement, an effort that Trump border czar Tom Homan has acknowledged blunted the impact of the administration’s citywide deportation crackdown so far.
“I think it’s going to be a uniting factor for all immigrants in Chicago,” she added. “If one of us is not free, none of us are free.”
In the meantime, thousands of people are “living life on pause,” said Olha Lukova, 28.
Two years of war compounded two years of COVID-19 isolation in Kyiv before she and her boyfriend fled for refuge in Chicago.
And after a year living in a new home, Lukova might have to figure out an entire new one.
“Now our generation is a generation of intervals,” she said. “It means that when you’re young, you just put years of your life in the garbage. You can’t make any plans for the future.”