US extends humanitarian status to Ukrainians who fled war

The decision allows Ukrainians living in the US to continue to access services and allays concerns about legal limbo.

The administration of US President Joe Biden will extend the one-year authorization granted to thousands of Ukrainians living in the countryallowing them to renew their humanitarian status and stay longer, just when their paperwork was about to expire.

The news comes shortly after the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which caused millions of refugees to flee.

The Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that some 25,000 Ukrainians who entered the United States. southern border with mexico they can extend their stay beyond the year they were initially granted.

“For this first-mover group of Ukrainians, the continued legal right to live, work and access resettlement assistance in the US is absolutely crucial to their well-being,” said the head of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, in a statement. statement.

More than 118,000 Ukrainians has come to the US through a program known as humanitarian parole, which allows people fleeing desperate circumstances to enter the US, where they can apply for more permanent immigration pathways out of harm’s way.

Those authorizations last for two years, but about 25,000 people who entered the US through Mexico in 2022 were only granted a one-year permit.

The extension will allow them to continue accessing services such as health care and food assistance, and will ease concerns about their legal status in the country.

In recent years, humanitarian parole has been implemented to bring groups of people from countries like Ukraine and Afghanistan to the US.

However, many Afghans who were paroled into the US after collapse of the US-backed government in Afghanistan in August 2021 have yet to see their authorization extended. Some worry that they could end up in a state of legal limbo and lose their work authorization if a solution is not found before their two years in the US.

Advocacy groups have lobbied Congress to pass a bill known as the Afghan Adjustment Act that would provide paroled Afghans a path to permanent status, but the bill does not have been past

“Thousands of Afghans who were evacuated to the United States last summer had to endure the traumatic journey of having to flee their homeland,” the US-based activist group Afghans For A Better Tomorrow said in a press release. for a better tomorrow).PDF) last August. “They should not be forced to individually relive that trauma through burdensome legal processes.”

Some have accused the US government of a racist double standards in how he administers the humanitarian parole system.

Human rights groups have criticized the Biden administration for processing Afghan humanitarian parole applications at a slow pace and largely rejecting the ones you have processed.

With Russia’s war in Ukraine raging, a United Nations survey found that about 65 percent of Ukrainian refugees who fled the invasion plans to stay in their host countries until hostilities cease.

Doing so often means hardship, with many struggling to adapt to life in new countries after emotionally draining journeys to safety.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, nearly 8 million Ukrainian refugees have left the country, according to the UN refugee agency. Millions more have been displaced within Ukraine itself.