I fled Ukraine and rebuilt my life in Georgia. Now my legal status is at risk.

This article was originally published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

I arrived in Georgia on June 3, 2022, with my son and two backpacks. That’s all we had left after fleeing Kharkiv, Ukraine, when our home was destroyed in the war.

Back in Ukraine, I was proud of the life I had built — a fulfilling career in the oil and gas industry, two master’s degrees, and a stable home for my child. But war does not ask what you’ve achieved. It takes. It forces you to start over.

We came to the United States through a program called Uniting for Ukraine (U4U), which allowed U.S. residents to sponsor Ukrainians fleeing the war, offering us temporary protection called humanitarian parole. It gave us safety and a chance to breathe. It also — miraculously — allowed us to later sponsor my husband to reunite with us as a family. But like thousands of others, we now live with the painful reality that our future here is far from certain.

Humanitarian parole does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship. For many of us in Georgia and across the country, it means that while we work, pay taxes and raise our children, we live under a cloud of anxiety, knowing we could lose our legal status — and everything we’re working to rebuild — with the stroke of a pen.

And that’s what the Trump administration is threatening to do. In one of its first actions in office, it shut down the Uniting for Ukraine program and other similar humanitarian parole programs and paused all pending applications. Since, it has revoked status from people who came in through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) humanitarian parole program — and with it ended their work authorization and ability to continue living here legally. Trump has said his administration is deciding whether Ukrainians could be next.

The harsh reality is that at any moment, thousands of families like mine across Georgia and the nation could lose their status, lose their work permits, be forced into legal limbo, or face deportation. In fact, some Ukrainians who came here through U4U have already lost their jobs because their parole expired and their applications to renew were denied or remain unadjudicated.

We came here for safety, but we are living in fear. We’ve contributed in every way we can. But without a permanent solution, we remain at risk of being uprooted again — not by bombs this time, but by broken promises.

What we need is a pathway to permanent residency for humanitarian parolees.

Continue reading this article here.