US to welcome Ukraine refugees but no longer through Mexico

“It is going to be good for people. I’m happy,” said San Diego resident Ludmilo Jaaniste, who was at the shelter to get her niece and her niece’s 12-year-old daughter after they fled Kyiv. “They (the US) were taking people, so why not make it easier.”

The US says it expects to admit up to 100,000 refugees from Ukraine, and about 15,000 have come since the Feb. 24 invasion, mostly through Mexico. Starting Monday, that will no longer be an option except in extreme circumstances, officials said.

It’s an effort by the US to uphold its commitment to help Eastern European nations contend with the 5 million refugees who have fled Ukraine while trying to reduce the number of migrants seeking to cross the US-Mexico border.

Complicating matters, however, the US plans next month to lift a public health order, known as Title 42, that enables authorities to quickly turn away migrants at the US-Mexico border without giving them a chance to claim asylum. The Biden administration has been exempting Ukrainian refugees, but will no longer do so.

“We are proud to deliver on President Biden’s commitment to welcome 100,000 Ukrainians and others fleeing Russian aggression to the United States,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a statement announcing the effort. “The Ukrainian people continue to suffer immense tragedy and loss as a result of Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on their country.”

US officials say a majority of the Ukrainian refugees want to stay in Eastern Europe because many hope eventually to return home.

Advocates have said the US should take more than 100,000 refugees and further expedite the process.

Public support doesn’t seem to be an issue. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll shows 65 percent of Americans favor accepting Ukrainian refugees into the US, while 15 percent oppose. An additional 19 percent say they neither favor nor oppose.

To qualify for admission to the US under the new program, officially known as Uniting for Ukraine, people must have been in Ukraine as of Feb. 11; have a sponsor, which could be family or an organization; meet vaccination and other public health requirements; and pass background checks.

Typically, people would start applications in their home country, but that’s no longer possible because the US pulled its diplomats from Ukraine. The State Department will expand resettlement operations in Eastern Europe under the new program to compensate.

Most of those admitted will receive two years of residence and authorization to work in the United States under what’s known as humanitarian parole. Those coming to the US through the formal refugee process, including members of religious minority groups, will receive permanent legal residency.

A downside of the new effort is that humanitarian parole generally does not include temporary housing support and other benefits provided through the traditional refugee program, which is only slowly recovering from Trump-era cutbacks, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Nevertheless, Vignarajah and other refugee advocates welcomed the announcement. “Families desperately seeking to bring their loved ones directly to safety in the US have a glimmer of hope, where there once was exceedingly little,” she said.

Refugees will encounter a streamlined process in Europe, but they won’t be able to complete it in Mexico, senior administration officials told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the program before the public announcement.

Instead, Ukrainians who show up at the border will generally be turned away and told to apply for entry under the new program. That is the situation for most migrants under the public health order in place since early in the pandemic in March 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the use of Title 42, which has been used to turn away more than 1.7 million people, is set to end May 23. The agency is under pressure to keep it in place not to control COVID-19, as it was supposedly intended, but to help ease an increase in migrants seeking to cross the border.

Critics of the use of Title 42 at the border have pointed out that it denies people their right under US law and international treaty to make claims for asylum and forces migrants to return to dangerous conditions in Northern Mexico and elsewhere.