They were welcomed to the United States with open arms under the Biden administration, but this month President Donald Trump said he would soon decide whether to revoke the legal status of some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the war with Russia.
Amid the deep uncertainty about their future in this country and the fate of their own, Ukrainians in Maine are anxious and confused about what to do.
“I come back to the questions of, where can I find a safe place, again?” said one Ukrainian woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she’s afraid she could lose her immigration status. She came to the U.S. with her children through a Biden-era program called Uniting for Ukraine.
She said she knows the program was intended to be temporary. But said she’s made a new life here. She got a job, learned English, and enrolled her children in school.
And she said it’s still too dangerous to return to Ukraine, where she said air raid sirens and rocket attacks are a daily occurrence in her hometown. She’s also skeptical that Russian president Vladimir Putin would honor a negotiated ceasefire long-term.
“I don’t trust these peace negotiations with Russia. So I believe it’s only temporary,” she said.
It’s a common view among Ukrainians in the state. Oleg Opalnyk is originally from Ukraine and has lived in the U.S. for about 25 years. He said trusting Putin to abide by a peace deal ignores the history of Russian aggression towards Ukraine, including Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
“You can’t just tell Putin, ‘oh, let’s make a deal.’ You know, ‘maybe you take this and we’ll take this,’” Opalnyk said. “No, he wants [it] all. That’s his plan.”
In the last three years, Opalnyk said he’s helped about 100 people resettle in Maine through Uniting for Ukraine.
But President Trump cancelled that program, and made comments this month suggesting he could revoke Humanitarian Parole protections for Ukrainians already in the U.S. Opalnyk said that has stoked widespread fear.
“A lot of families lost everything in Ukraine, or they cannot go there because it’s still war over there,” he said. “If they lose status here, what next?”
“As far as I’ve seen, Ukraine is the only country where they actually threatened to revoke the current parole status,” said Lisa Parisio, with the Portland-based Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project. She said it’s part of a larger push to end a number of Biden-era immigration program, including for people fleeing Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and Afghanistan.
Parisio said those already in the country can pursue other legal pathways, including asylum and Temporary Protected Status.
But she said TPS is also in the crosshairs.
“We know that the administration is targeting TPS broadly. They have already taken steps to terminate TPS for Venezuela,” she said.
Those moves — like much of the administration’s immigration agenda — are being challenged in court.
Meanwhile, another Ukrainian woman in Maine, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said when she first fled the war, she knew her stay in the U.S. would be temporary. But she said she got a job she loves and has built community here.
Still, if she loses her legal status, she said she’d return to Ukraine to rejoin her family, who are still living under the constant threat of Russian attacks.
“They almost don’t talk about what’s going on, about missile attacks,” she said. “They just got used to this. And for me being here, I can’t really understand how it’s possible to get used to this danger.”
For now, she said the uncertainty has pushed her to enjoy every moment of her life in the U.S., because she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to stay.
