As the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine was beginning to unfold, Father Robert Hitchens, a pastor at the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family in Washington, D.C., received a request for help for Ukrainians who fled their country and now faced an impossible choice.
“I had a call from a woman whose Ukrainian relatives are stuck in Budapest right now—the mother has a visa and the older child has a visa to come to the U.S., but the youngest child does not have a visa,” said Hitchens. “She’s not going to leave the young child behind, and they’re running into brick walls.”
Currently, Ukrainian citizens are required to apply for a visa abroad in order to enter the United States, and with millions of refugees entering Ukraine’s neighboring countries, the line for those visas risks becoming impossibly long. For those who have already been forced apart from their loved ones by war, Hitchens said, the possibility of yet another family separation is too great to bear.
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“One plus one plus one equals three—we can’t leave one behind, especially the littlest child,” Hitchens said. “These are the obstacles that people are encountering.”
More than 1.5 million people have fled their homeland since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began two weeks ago, most of them finding safety in neighboring European countries that have largely welcomed them with open arms.
But with millions more expected to follow them in hopes of escaping indiscriminate targeting of civilians by Russian troops, pressure is growing on the Biden administration to remove bureaucratic stumbling blocks that are preventing the war’s refugees from finding safety in the United States.
Now, Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as refugee advocates and community leaders, are calling on the administration to be clearer in its plans to more clearly address the looming refugee crisis in Europe.
“The majority of Ukrainians aren’t interested in leaving Ukraine—they’re leaving because someone’s dropping shells on their head,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told The Daily Beast. “Even when this conflict comes to an end, and it may not be anytime soon, we’re talking about generational damage here in terms of entire cities, the lives of families being destroyed. And so that’s going to be a major effort long-term that we should start thinking about.”
“Friends, families, and community members in the U.S. and others who want to express solidarity with Ukraine would welcome their nationals,” said Helena Olea, an international human rights lawyer and the associate director for programs at immigration nonprofit Alianza Americas. “The U.S. has the capacity and resources to offer that protection.”
Processing capacity for visas and refugee resettlement is also in desperate need of expansion, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
“The refugee resettlement system is precisely how we protect vulnerable populations, whether they are from Afghanistan or Ukraine,” O’Mara Vignarajah said. “The administration must rebuild and streamline the refugee program’s processing capacity to prepare for this new humanitarian emergency.”
Since Russia’s unprovoked invasion, Ukrainian civilians—primarily women, children and the elderly—have left the country by the hundreds of thousands. They’ve arrived in Germany and Poland via packed trains and bumper-to-bumper highways, most have no plans beyond successfully surviving a Russian onslaught that has made little effort to avoid killing civilians. Their entry into those and other Schengen Area countries, which have largely welcomed Ukrainians seeking refuge from the war, has been eased by the lack of visa requirements for Ukrainians to enter them.
But with the prospect of millions more potential refugees needing safe haven from the Russian invasion—the United Nations estimates that as many as 4 million Ukrainians may ultimately flee the country—the United States is still maintaining its visa requirement for Ukrainians to enter the country, despite moves by the European Union to ease such restrictions on humanitarian grounds.
“There is a lot of talk about sharing responsibility at the international level and it is necessary to create the conditions for it to be possible,” said Olea. “As it currently exists, the visa waiver program has too many limitations and constrictions that does not allow it to function for situations like this one.”
The United States has committed to allowing refugees from the conflict to enter the country in the abstract, with officials pointing to President Joe Biden’s decision to lift the cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 from the historically low levels implemented under the Trump administration.
“Of course, we’ll look at that,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview on Sunday when asked whether the United States was prepared to accept Ukrainians to alleviate what may be the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, saying that the administration was “committed to doing anything we can” to support European allies bearing the immediate burden of taking in Ukrainians.
“And then, as appropriate, if people seek refugee status in the United States, of course, we will look at that and I’m sure act on that,” Blinken added.
But the delay, advocates for lifting the visa requirements told The Daily Beast, adds unnecessary uncertainty to the plans of displaced Ukrainians in desperate need of stability. With the American embassy in Kyiv fully evacuated, Ukrainians seeking entry into the United States must now queue up at State Department outposts in Frankfurt and Warsaw, a laborious process that could be swamped with the wave of millions of people expected to continue leaving the country.
“We have the ability—what we need to push the State Department to recognize is that they should have the will to do so as well,” said Aaron Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality, which works to help LGBT people in the immigration system. Morris said that commitments by the United States to help Ukrainians find refuge in Europe may work in the short term, but that the administration needs to allow for “a longer-term solution” for Ukrainians to find safe haven here.
“Visas are hard,” Morris said. “They’re slow, they take a lot of time.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told The Daily Beast on Monday he believes the current refugee crisis is a reflection of a greater need to raise the refugee cap, calling the situation “more evidence that we have a much bigger need to admit refugees than we currently can administer.”
Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also said he’d be supportive of humanitarian parole for Ukrainian refugees—which would allow Ukrainians fleeing the invasion to enter the U.S. without a visa. But the senator added it’s important “to talk with the Ukrainian government about what they need from us in terms of refugee policy.”
“There’s always a tension between rescuing people without emptying out the country,” Murphy said.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), another Senate Foreign Relations member, said she’s “supportive of the idea” of humanitarian parole for Ukrainians but said lawmakers “would have some work to do to figure out the specifics of how that would work.”
Refugee advocates have applauded the administration’s implementation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Ukrainians on March 3, which prevents Ukrainian citizens already in the United States from being deported for the next 18 months.
Kaitlin Bell, communications program manager for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, told The Daily Beast that TPS has been “significantly underused” by the Biden administration up to this point.
“Given the state of play in Congress,” Bell said, TPS “is going to be one of the key tools to provide undocumented people protection and a measure of stability and security going forward.”
“This TPS designation is a concrete show of solidarity with the Ukrainian people,” O’Mara Vignarajah said. “Protecting Ukrainian families from deportation is the least we can do amid a Russian onslaught that has targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.”
But a White House official tamped down expectations of changes in visa policy on Ukraine any time soon, instead emphasizing American support for European allies who are currently shouldering nearly all of the burden of taking in refugees.
“I’m not aware of any new plans in the works at the moment,” the official said. “We are working closely with European allies and partners who are on the front lines of the response, as well as international organizations and NGOs, to support those displaced internally within Ukraine and those who are seeking safety in neighboring countries.”
The official added that the administration expects most Ukrainian refugees to prefer staying in neighboring countries in Central Europe, “where they may have family, and where there are large diaspora communities, in the hope they can return home soon.”
“This challenge is likely to escalate in the near future,” the official said, “and the United States stands by to support our Allies and partners.”
The administration’s assertion that Ukrainians are better off being close to their homeland is a fair one, Olea said, despite echoing similar statements from the prior administration about Syrians in the Middle East that were seen as shouldering neighboring countries with a refugee crisis.
“The preferred international response is to allow refugees to remain close to their country of origin, so that return is possible—Ukraine needs its people, and amid the conflict we should be thinking of rebuilding and returning,” Olea said.
But the pressure is still building on Ukraine’s neighbors, not all of which may be positioned to continue accepting millions more refugees.
“A country like Moldova, that has enough of its own problems, has graciously taken in over a quarter-million refugees,” said Hitchens, the pastor. “We can’t just say to Western Europe, ‘Just take in 5 million refugees without support.’ The United States needs to step up to the plate and realize that this is the worst human tragedy in Europe since World War II.”
People of all faiths, Hitchens noted, are “fleeing annihilation”—and every country needs to do its part in helping them. While the United States may be geographically distant from Ukraine, there are large Ukrainian communities here, from New York City’s East Village to the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio. Those pockets of community, Olea said, makes the United States “closer to the hearts and minds of Ukrainians.”
“They will find the support they need in their communities in the U.S.” Olea said. “Closing the possibilities for Ukrainians to come to the U.S. is… unjustifiable.”
—with additional reporting by Ursula Perano
