When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, many Americans rallied behind Ukrainians in a rare moment of solidarity. Charity drives sprung up. Ukrainian flags hung from storefronts.
And in a corner of the Midwest that had sheltered Southeast Asian refugees half a century before, Angela Boelens was determined to see her community become part of the effort to protect Ukrainians fleeing the war.
After months of winding her way through a detailed government vetting process, Ms. Boelens became one of the first Americans to bring over a Ukrainian family: the Hedzhymanovis (and their big, fluffy white cat, a Turkish Angora mix named Barzick).
Business and community leaders across eastern Iowa and western Illinois came together to help the family and other Ukrainian arrivals find housing and jobs. Ms. Boelens, a college professor, started a nonprofit called IA Nice that had helped more than 75 refugees resettle in DeWitt, Iowa, a Republican stronghold of 5,000 people just north of Davenport. Some people now call the community “Little Ukraine.”
But the Ukrainian families that thought they had found refuge in DeWitt have been plunged into increasing uncertainty since Donald J. Trump returned to the White House.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office to terminate legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had entered the United States through Biden-era humanitarian programs. Three days later, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suspended the processing of petitions and renewals for Uniting for Ukraine, a Biden-era program that allowed more than 240,000 Ukrainians to live and work lawfully in the U.S.
Even after a federal judge ordered the government to continue the Uniting for Ukraine program, many Ukrainians have seen their deportation protections, driver’s licenses and work permits expire with no indication of when, or whether, they would be reinstated.
And after the Supreme Court allowed the government to terminate, for now, a similar program for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, there is growing concern among the Ukrainians that they are next.
Stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts across the country, which touched off days of protests this month in Los Angeles, are adding to the Ukrainians’ fears that the protections provided by the Biden administration won’t shield them much longer, even though their new neighbors want them to stay.
“We are forcing people to either become illegal or to become a burden on the community, and that doesn’t feel good for these families, and it doesn’t feel good for the community, and it makes absolutely no sense,” Ms. Boelens said.
At their white-paneled home on a quiet street in DeWitt, Olena and Maksym Hedzhymanovi were trying on a recent evening to make sense of how the ground had shifted so quickly.
Olena recalled waking up as missiles flew over their house in Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s northeast border with Russia. She began shoving the family’s belongings into suitcases, she said. Her older daughter, Anhelina, wept.
“Mom, please tell me this is fireworks,” Olena recalled Anhelina, who is now 20, say to her. “‘No,’ I said, ‘this is war.’”
Her younger daughter, Sofiia, 12, said she had been preparing for an acrobatic gymnastic competition — “the first I had in my life” — but the building where she had spent months practicing was bombed after they fled.
For six days, the family took shelter in a friend’s cold, muddy basement. Then they sought refuge in western Ukraine, far from the border with Russia.
“It was very difficult to make a decision to pack my whole life into three suitcases and come to live in America,” Maksym said. “We can’t imagine how to pack our lives again — three suitcases again and go somewhere again. Our big dream is to stay and live here, as we have already fallen in love with this place.”
An Iowa Welcome
DeWitt and Clinton County, which surrounds it, are just north of the Quad Cities, an urban strip of eastern Iowa and western Illinois that hugs the Mississippi River.
Decades ago, Gov. Robert D. Ray, a Republican who was a vocal proponent of efforts to resettle refugees in the United States, urged Iowans to show moral courage and accept thousands of Southeast Asian refugees, including Tai Dam people in 1974 and refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in 1977. Those efforts were part of Cold War-era politics that viewed the United States as a beacon of democracy.
It was that sense of civic obligation, along with the memory of her Polish American great-grandmother, that motivated Angela Boelens. When her great-grandmother arrived in Chicago as a refugee during World War II, pregnant and speaking no English, an Italian American family offered her a home.
But over the past decade, Mr. Trump has led a growing segment of the Republican Party to embrace a deep skepticism of global cooperation and American leadership abroad, and he won Clinton County with 59 percent of the vote last November. So Ms. Boelens, a Democrat, worried that she would be dismissed as a “bleeding heart.”
She had initially planned to serve as a financial sponsor for just one Ukrainian family. Soon, though, she sponsored a second. Then a third family reached out. And a fourth.
She did not have the resources to take them all in, so she began to seek other sponsors to help. To her surprise, a banking executive whom she approached offered a plan. He persuaded about 20 business leaders to come together to raise more than $400,000 to buy two houses in DeWitt. Arriving Ukrainian families would be able to stay in the houses temporarily while they searched for jobs and looked for permanent residences.
Ms. Boelens, who served on several nonprofit boards before going into teaching college business courses, established her charitable organization to manage the funds, and the IA Nice initiative grew. A hospital system in the area gave them ownership of two more houses. A businessman lent another. A farmer donated a car. Volunteers helped the refugee families find work, fill out immigration and loan paperwork and enroll children in school.
Within three months, most of the newcomers no longer needed financial support. The Ukrainian families blended readily into the predominantly white Iowan communities of Clinton County, where German, Irish and other European lines of ancestry run deep. Many conservative Iowans who had grown up facing the specter of communist Russia during the Cold War recognized an American duty to aid refugees from imperiled and democratically-aligned nations.
Olena and Maksym Hedzhymanovi went to work for a construction company for nearly a year, and then Maksym opened up his own construction business with friends. Olena is now a nursing assistant. Anhelina hopes to attend college, and Sofiia has joined a cheerleading squad.
The family took out loans to buy a house and a car. They found peace in the vast Iowa fields of corn, soybeans and sunflowers that remind them of the countryside in their native Ukraine, long one of Europe’s agricultural engines for its oilseed and grain production. Other Ukrainian families have followed a similar path into the state, filling labor shortages at construction sites, hospitals and small businesses.
“That’s an economic boost for us,” said Jim Irwin, a Republican who serves on the Clinton County Board of Supervisors, noting that the county’s population had declined by more residents since 2010 than any other in the state.
Changing Legal Lines
Last year, Ms. Boelens and other IA Nice leaders considered extending their initiative to include immigrants from other troubled nations, like Haiti and Venezuela, who were in temporary programs. IA Nice is nonpartisan and has both Democrats and Republicans on its board, Ms. Boelens said, but its volunteers, donors, and contributors have mainly been Republicans.
Supporters of the group believed they had developed a model for helping refugees and immigrants settle in an orderly way. But as Mr. Trump campaigned for a second term last year, he and his allies were attacking the Biden-era programs for refugees, arguing that the protections they offered were meant to be temporary but were being exploited by people who intended to stay in the United States permanently.
In DeWitt and the Quad Cities, some Republican community and business leaders say now that they have been struggling to reconcile their support for Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies with their frustrations over losing immigrant workers and the new cultural vibrancy the immigrants brought to their communities. Some local leaders have bombarded Senator Charles E. Grassley and other lawmakers with calls for legislative action.
Students at Catholic and public schools have written letters to legislators in support of their Ukrainian classmates, and Ms. Boelens and IA Nice organizers have begun petitioning Congress to create a new immigration pathway they are calling a “Heartland Economic Growth Visa.” To garner allies at the state level, some DeWitt families have visited with state lawmakers in the Iowa Legislature.
Iowans are not alone in their sentiments. From Springfield, Ohio, to Kennett, Mo., to Prince George’s County, Md., some supporters of Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration measures have felt blindsided or betrayed as they witness their friends, neighbors and workers face deportation or lose their livelihoods.
At Renewal by Andersen, a local window-replacement company in Davenport, Sam Heer, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump, said the president had been right in attempting to curb the number of people entering the country without valid asylum claims. But he hoped that his party could reach “a happy medium” by providing lawful pathways for immigrant workers.
Mr. Heer said he had spent thousands of dollars trying to secure work visas for two of his Ukrainian employees who refurbish windows. Their applications are likely to take a few more years to be processed. While they wait, he estimates, he will have to hire and fire at least 20 workers to fill their shoes.
“It’s not as though the very specific job is that technical or hard to do, but the reality is people that will do it, and do it to their ability, are incredibly hard to find,” he said.
His two Ukrainian workers, Liana Avetisian and her cousin Alina Mirzoian, fled from Kyiv in the spring of 2023.
Back in Ukraine, Ms. Avetisian and her husband, Sergei, had been real estate agents, shuttling their daughter, Karine, now 14, between school and horseback riding lessons, vacationing in Turkey and Egypt and planning family cookouts. Ms. Mirzoian had been a graphic design student.
In Iowa, they all went into painting and construction, and Ms. Avetisian and Ms. Mirzoian learned to paint walls on stilts and to dress windows.
In late May, they went to work at Renewal by Andersen one last time before their protections expired. Standing on a buzzing factory floor, Ms. Avetisian tried to focus on staining a large window frame that was splayed out on the worktable before her. Wipe. Brush. Dab. Repeat.
“We do not know what to expect tomorrow,” Ms. Avetisian said in an interview, adding that headaches from the stress grip her on most days. Her family has cobbled together only enough savings and donations to pay their mortgage and other bills for the next two months.
She said most of her co-workers did not understand the tenuous nature of their immigration status. In the office kitchen, a cake they brought in for her and Ms. Mirzoian was decorated in sprinkles and red, white and navy blue frosting.
It optimistically read: “It’s Not Goodbye, See You Soon.”
Read by Jazmine Ulloa
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
The post In Deep Red Iowa, Ukrainians Found Home and Community. Now Their Fate Is in Limbo. appeared first on New York Times.
