Veronika McCann, 31, said she had been having “panic attacks” following reports that Trump was considering revoking the temporary legal statuses for an estimated 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion.
Trump’s administration is seeking to strip legal status from more than 1.8 million migrants allowed to enter the US under temporary humanitarian parole programmes launched under the Biden administration, sources told the Reuters news agency.
Although her mother received a green card through family reunification, Mariia was given Temporary Protected Status, and Anna came on Ukrainian Humanitarian Parole.
Ms McCann, back, with her mother and sisters
“It makes me feel sick,” she said. “It feels like he [Trump] is siding with the devil, Putin, to remove Ukrainians. As much as I am proudly American, I still have my Ukrainian roots. My heart has always been with Ukraine. It hurts a lot to see all this happening.”
“My family survived complete hell,” she said. “I’m so thankful they’re alive. My mother was walking to her job when bombs started falling pretty much in front of her.”
“They would just have to go back right under the bombs,” she said. “We don’t have any relatives in Europe. They can stay with my dad and grandparents in Ukraine. It is noisy and dangerous there. There is no way of knowing that a bomb will be dropped on our apartment. My mother’s family are in territories that has been occupied by Russians.”
“We just keep facing all these extra expenses with broken immigration law in this country,” she said. “We are having panic attacks. What’s going to happen? Will they have to go back to Ukraine under the bombing?”
“I’ve been bombarded by phone calls since two minutes after the news story was published. My clients are extremely scared. They’re afraid of uncertainty, afraid their status will be revoked. Afraid how they will feed their children, how they will work,” she said.
“I’m also being called by American employers who employ 20, 60, 100 people from Ukraine,” she said. “Ukrainians have specialised skills, it’s American employers who are extremely concerned. Somebody called me and said he has 60 Ukrainian employees. It’s a huge concern because that would hit American business’.
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Read More“They have nothing left of their homes, they literally have nowhere to go,” she said. She represents people from Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine which was levelled by Russian troops in the early days of the war.
But the problem was that the Uniting For Ukraine (U4U) programme they were allowed into the US on was not the work of Congress, but at the discretion of the Biden administration.
But instead, changes are happening sooner than planned, including an order last month from Homeland Security pausing all applications filed under U4U. That includes applications from people trying to get to the US, and from people already there.
“Their homes have been destroyed, their country is an active war zone, to pull the status from those people would leave them in severe distress.
“I cannot believe the administration will do this. Can they do it? Yes. But I hope they won’t.”
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