Through delays, expirations, and “voluntary” departures, the United States is redefining the limits of humanitarian protection for Ukrainians, leaving thousands in limbo between legality and expulsion.
In 2022, the United States opened a dedicated humanitarian parole pathway—Uniting for Ukraine (U4U)—allowing Ukrainians to enter quickly if a vetted U.S. sponsor agreed to support them. The program paired expedited entry with access to work permits and, in many states, driver’s licenses and social services, signalling an intended, if provisional, welcome. By September 2024, more than 221,000 Ukrainians had arrived through the program, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.
Three years on, the policy environment looks very different. The Trump administration, after taking office in January 2025, suspended new U4U admissions and paused renewals for many existing parolees, introducing bureaucratic barriers that have made basic life functions—employment, transportation, and access to services—progressively harder.
Even where formal status is not yet revoked, the loss or delay of work and driver’s license renewals creates an incentive to leave. The result is a covert attempt to push refugees, who are technically allowed to stay but cannot survive without income or mobility, to self-deport.
“By international law, once someone reaches your border, you have to offer them protection until you adjudicate their case,” explained sociologist Filiz Garip, who studies migration and deterrence. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has settled into a grinding stalemate. After early advances and later counteroffensives, Ukrainian forces now face mounting fatigue, while Russia consolidates its hold over occupied regions. Displaced Ukrainians abroad are therefore caught between a homeland they cannot safely return to and a host country whose legal hospitality is evaporating.
Garip sees in this case a mirror of global patterns. “What’s happening to Ukrainians all around the world is reflecting a more general trend on asylum protections,” she said. “Countries are trying to prevent migrants from reaching their borders and from being even considered for asylum.” She pointed to how governments increasingly outsource or bureaucratize deterrence, constructing “workarounds to deny people’s rights” through visa rules and administrative bottlenecks rather than overt deportations.
In the summer of 2025, that tension peaked. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) email, later deemed a clerical mistake, erroneously instructed some U4U parolees to depart within seven days. Officials walked it back, confirming that U4U was not terminated at this time, but the episode triggered panic across communities already facing work authorization lapses.
The government’s concurrent rollout of “Project Homecoming,” which offers a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance to those who voluntarily confirm departure through the CBP Home app, only deepened suspicion that the policy goal was quiet repatriation rather than protection. Officials insist participation is voluntary, but for those unable to work or access housing, it can feel less like an offer than an ultimatum.
“A lot of these people are under temporary protection status,” Garip noted. “By definition, those statuses can be revoked. As soon as that program expires, you lose those rights.” That fragility, she added, means permission to remain depends entirely on conditions set—and removed—by administrative decree.
What makes Ukrainians a particularly revealing case, Garip continued, is how cultural proximity shaped their initial welcome. “In the Ukrainian case, cultural proximity played a huge role—you can actually tell this from the way politicians talked about it,” she said. But when enforcement logic takes over, sympathy becomes a short-term asset, not a policy foundation.
The shift is also perceptual. According to Oksana Nesterenko, a Ukrainian legal scholar and visiting research fellow at Princeton, Ukrainian media have tracked these changes in distinct phases. “The first stories appeared when the Uniting for Ukraine program was paused—that created a burst of news and a lot of uncertainty about what it meant for people already in the U.S.,” she explained. “Later, attention shifted to delays with renewing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and, more recently, to the growing concern over the loss of work authorization.”
Nesterenko noted that coverage differed by geography. “Outlets in Ukraine mostly reported the facts in a neutral way, sometimes noting that people might return home or move to Europe,” she explained. “Meanwhile, Ukrainian media in the U.S. wrote about the issue with more empathy, focusing on how the loss of work authorisation affected people’s daily lives and stability.”
When asked whether Ukrainians in the media compared the U.S. system to the EU’s Temporary Protection framework, Nesterenko said such parallels rarely appear explicitly. “In Ukrainian media, especially those based in Ukraine, the focus has been more on how European countries—particularly Poland and Germany—are now encouraging Ukrainians to return home voluntarily,” she said. “So the discussion is less about comparing U.S. and EU policies, and more about Ukraine’s own challenge of creating conditions for people’s return.”
Still, many Ukrainians abroad understand the precariousness of their situation. Those who filed TPS renewals on time generally keep their work authorisation while cases are processed, but others—especially those outside U4U or TPS—face severe uncertainty. “For them, it’s not only about losing the right to work but about their overall legal status in the U.S.” Nesterenko said. “Many who lose their work authorization tend to leave and move to Europe, because they don’t want to face legal problems and need to be able to work to pay for housing, access healthcare, and send their children to school.”
As such departures multiply, the line between voluntary and coerced becomes blurred. The system no longer orders people to leave, instead eroding the conditions that make staying possible. For those without savings, Nesterenko said, “they are the first to leave, while others with some financial cushion try to adjust their status—though the options for doing so are quite limited.” The policy’s quiet efficiency lies in transforming endurance into choice, until leaving feels like the only rational act left.
This strategy marks a new frontier in migration governance, fine-tuning attrition instead of enforcing mass expulsion. It preserves the façade of legality—no roundups, no deportation flights—but achieves similar outcomes through slow suffocation. By making lawful life impossible, the government avoids the optics of deportation while shrinking protected populations.
Ultimately, the moral and legal challenge lies in accountability. If a state engineers departure without issuing removals, who bears responsibility for the outcome? The U.S. approach toward Ukrainians has lost its humanitarian inspiration, revealing an administrative future of asylum governed less by borders than by expiration dates.
