For Denys, the booms of fireworks in Spokane, Washington, still bring a jolt of anxiety. His children, too, flinch at the sound. Not long ago, those booms meant Russian missile attacks in their hometown of Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city just miles from the Russian border. In 2023, after a hospital where his youngest daughter, Olivia, had just been born was bombed, Denys knew he had to leave Ukraine. The escape route came from a former neighbor now living in the United States: “He called me and said, ‘We have a nice program — Uniting for Ukraine. If you want to come, grab your family and move,’” Denys recalled, as reported by InvestigateWest.
Denys, who asked that his last name not be used, seized the chance. Like nearly 240,000 Ukrainians since 2022, he arrived in the U.S. through the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program, launched by President Joe Biden. The program allowed Ukrainians to stay and work in America for two years at a time, provided they found an American sponsor. Denys settled in Spokane, learned English, and landed a welding job at Metals Fabrication Company. For three years, he built a new life — until June 2025, when it all came to a halt.
The reason? The Trump administration, having returned to power, froze renewals for humanitarian parole programs. Denys’s work authorization expired, and he lost his job. “I’m very worried about my family,” he told InvestigateWest. “I need to buy food. I have three kids.”
Denys’s story is far from unique. According to Human Rights First, a global coalition of 268 faith-based, non-governmental, and civil society organizations released an open letter on September 22, 2025, urging UN Member States to uphold and strengthen international treaties protecting refugees and to reject efforts to undermine these legal norms. The letter, organized by Human Rights First and ICVA, came just before the UN General Assembly’s High-level meeting, reflecting growing global concern over the rollback of refugee protections.
In the U.S., the Uniting for Ukraine program is just one of several humanitarian parole initiatives caught in the political crossfire. The Trump administration’s freeze affects nearly 1.8 million migrants, including more than 530,000 from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and over 9,000 from Afghanistan. In Spokane, the impact is immediate and personal. Two Venezuelan immigrants, who had come legally through parole programs, were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in June 2025 after attending a scheduled meeting. Their detention sparked mass protests, resulting in 30 arrests and federal charges for nine demonstrators.
For Ukrainians, the situation is especially fraught. While they haven’t faced the same racial profiling or public vilification as some other groups, they find themselves in limbo — unable to renew work permits, forced to consider illegal work or relying on charity, and, in some cases, contemplating leaving the U.S. altogether. “There’s this no-man’s-land,” Spokane immigration attorney Sam Smith told InvestigateWest. “There’s this in-between that they’re stuck in. There’s no good solution for them.”
Even employers feel the strain. Sara Weaver-Lundberg, vice president at Metals Fabrication Company, described Denys as a “gilded unicorn,” the kind of experienced worker impossible to replace. Losing him, she said, “put a strain on our production.” She reached out to legal and political contacts for help, but nothing has worked. “Denys did just that — he left Ukraine and entered this country legally. … Now, because of a pause in the program or backlog, he is living in this country with no job.”
Meanwhile, the collateral damage continues. Zhanna Oberemok, vice-president of the Spokane Slavic Association, noted that her husband’s trucking company lost about seven drivers in September 2025 alone, all because their commercial driver’s licenses became inactive when their work authorizations expired. “Within the next week or so, we’re going to be losing about seven drivers because their driver license just became inactive,” she said.
Denys, for his part, now relies on his sponsor — the same neighbor who helped him escape Ukraine — for food and rent. He waits for word from the state government about unemployment benefits, reflecting on the bitter irony that he’s become a cost to the government rather than a contributor. “I should probably find some job and work under the table, but I don’t want to do that,” Denys admitted. “But it’s like the government pushes us to do that. We don’t want to do that. We want to work legally and follow the law.”
Some, like Denys, consider applying for asylum, which can take five to ten years to process. Even then, work permits are only granted six months after application, meaning Denys wouldn’t be able to work legally until March 2026 at the earliest. The uncertainty is compounded by bureaucratic chaos. In April 2025, the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly sent emails to many Ukrainians, stating their humanitarian parole had been canceled and threatening enforcement actions — a message so widely distributed that even attorney Sam Smith received it by mistake.
Legal challenges are underway. In February 2025, Spokane physician and activist Kyle Varner joined a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration resume processing humanitarian parole applications. “There is something fundamentally and morally wrong with treating people differently and giving them fewer rights simply because they were not born in this country,” Varner wrote. A lower court ruling in June 2025 prompted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to lift the freeze on renewals, but approvals remain exceedingly rare. “We’ve seen some cases denied. And some cases be asked for additional evidence,” said Matthew Soerens, policy director for World Relief. “But at least the folks that we’re helping, we are not aware of cases being approved for humanitarian parole renewal from Ukraine.”
Congress has seen some bipartisan moves to help, with bills proposing continued work authorization and permanent residency for Ukrainian parolees. But as of late September 2025, neither has advanced. U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Republican from Spokane, co-authored a bipartisan letter in April urging the Trump administration to maintain protections for Ukrainians, noting, “Many of them have found employment, pay taxes, have their children enrolled in school, and are positively contributing to their new communities. Revoking their protections and sending them back to a war-torn country before peace is secured would be devastating for both them and their families.” Baumgartner received no response.
At the federal level, the outlook remains bleak. In September 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow announced plans to make work authorization even harder and more expensive, accusing the Biden administration of using permits to attract “droves of foreigners.” “To the extent that we can shut off work authorization once we terminate these paroles, we’ve done that,” Edlow said. “You may be eligible for a work permit, but that doesn’t mean anymore that that’s going to result in you being able to remain in this country.”
For now, Ukrainian immigrants like Denys live under what his sponsor, Mariia Chava, calls “the big question mark.” Denys, who can’t return to Ukraine, sums up the dilemma: he loves the U.S. and its freedoms, but can’t survive in a system that leaves him unable to provide for his family or secure legal status. “I love this country,” he said. “Just give me a chance to work.”
As debates rage at the UN and in Congress, the fate of thousands of families hangs in the balance, their futures shaped by the shifting winds of policy and politics — and by the hope that somewhere, someone will listen.
