The Situation: A Ukrainian Hostage Situation

The Situation on Monday compared Donald Trump and JD Vance to Neville Chamberlain and found them wanting.

Today, I awoke to news from Reuters that the Trump administration is contemplating the revocation of protective status for 240,000 Ukrainians currently living in the United States.

It’s an issue that hits close to home for me. Only yesterday afternoon, I was on a Zoom call with two friends who would be immediately affected by such a move. One runs an IT company in Ukraine and has 10 employees in Ukraine he is keeping employed while living here and doing activist activity. The other is a model and a performance artist. The three of us were talking about developing an app to improve information quality in discussions of Ukraine. 

This morning, I got a text from another friend, who sent me a link to the Reuters story and the cheery note, “Home sweet home”—meaning that she expected to have to leave.

This friend is Mariia Hlyten, an activist in Washington and New York who features prominently in the second episode of the Escalation podcast:

Marichka, as she’s known, has been desperately homesick for a long time and has long joked with me that Trump’s revoking her legal status might be the kick in the ass she needs to go back to Kyiv. She sometimes adopts the ironic pose that she can’t leave unless Trump kicks her out.

“I know you’re thrilled,” I responded, “But it’s terrible terrible news.” 

“I know. But otherwise I would [be] stuck here forever. 😎”

Marichka is not alone in looking at the bright side of Trump’s turning her life upside down only a few years after Putin did. The truth of the matter is that a lot of Ukrainians are ambivalent about being in the United States. Some feel guilt about not more directly contributing to the war effort. Many never wanted to leave at all. And now that the front is no longer in the suburbs of Kyiv, a lot of people feel like they could go back; though the capital still gets bombed regularly, it’s not in imminent danger of occupation.

The result is that, perhaps oddly, a lot of Ukrainians of my acquaintance seem less angry about the possibility of their getting expelled than are their American friends. One friend who sponsors a Ukrainian family says that they don’t seem nearly as enraged as she is. There’s a kind of stoicism associated with serial trauma. Three years of occupation, bombing, and war induce a certain numbness and resignation. Ukrainians passionately committed to the fight can also show a remarkable accepting attitude toward personal suffering. 

The fact that Ukrainians are not rioting over this latest betrayal does not mitigate at all the shameful policy decision the administration is pondering. The United States is right now materially contributing to the erosion of Ukraine’s military position, grossly undermining its political position, and simultaneously threatening to send hundreds of thousands of people back into a conflict zone it is actively making more dangerous for them. 

In response to the Reuters story, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt—whose Twitter profile declares that “America is BACK”—tweeted that “no decision has been made at this time” and called the story “fake news based on anonymous sources who have no idea what they’re talking about.” But note what she didn’t say: that the Trump administration had no plans to revoke protective status for Ukrainians.

The president himself addressed the matter today as well, and he too conspicuously didn’t deny that an end to temporary protective status for Ukrainians is coming.

“We’re not looking to hurt anybody, we’re certainly not looking to hurt them, and I’m looking at that,” he said of forcing 240,000 people back into a war zone. “There were some people that think that’s appropriate, and some people don’t, and I’ll be making the decision pretty soon.”

So what’s going on here?

One possibility is that this is simply part of Trump’s larger war on foreigners in the United States. The Ukrainians here under temporary protective status and a separate program specifically for Ukrainians are in no sense illegal immigrants, but they are here under programs that are easily turned off, and you can deport a lot of people by simply revoking these parole statuses for Ukrainians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Afghans. And Trump clearly wants to juice the deportation numbers. 

There was some reason to think that the Ukrainians might be in a different category from the others—for reasons both legitimate and disgusting. On the legitimate side, Ukraine is an active war zone, after all. But let’s also be candid: Ukrainians are, for the most part, white. And they’re not what anyone thinks of when they hear Trump’s vile rhetoric about migrants—or presumably what he is thinking about when he deploys rhetoric about pet eating and other such blood libels.

Most importantly, the Ukrainian government was, until Trump blew up the alliance over the past few weeks, a close ally, and it’s one that Trump wants things from. There was reason to hope that continuing to protect 240,000 vulnerable people was a trivially easy way to maintain good will.

But this brings me to the other possible motivation for this trial balloon. Since the Oval Office meeting the other day, the administration has suspended aid to Ukraine. It has paused intelligence sharing. Now “a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter” tell Reuters that the administration is poised to make a quarter of a million Ukrainians leave the country. And the administration denies it only to the extent that it denies having finalized the decision.

It’s hard not to see this as a pressure tactic directed at the Ukrainian government—and at Volodymyr Zelenskyy personally. Full pressure on all fronts. Fall in line and cooperate as the United States barters Ukraine’s fate with the genocidal Putin, and maybe some of that aid will start flowing again; maybe some of that intelligence Ukraine depends on will become available; and maybe we’ll let a whole lot of economically productive Ukrainians remain in the United States for another few months. But step out of line again, and we will make Ukraine feel it even at the level of children we have stepped up to shelter. 

“And I'll be making the decision pretty soon."

This is gangster stuff. And while nothing about it is surprising, given who Trump is, it’s perilously close in a moral sense to hostage taking.

It goes without saying that in any group of a quarter of a million people one capriciously orders to leave the country, not everyone will comply. It’s not that easy to turn your life upside down—again—and move internationally because someone moves a piece on a chessboard. Some will face real hardship. Some will stay illegally, making themselves vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation. This is a population that is disproportionately young and disproportionately female—military-aged males being generally barred from leaving Ukraine. And while many of them can go to European countries or other third countries, there are good reasons why many of them have come here, as opposed to elsewhere. There are as many stories as there are individuals.

I should pause here and concede that the same is true of other categories of migrants whose temporary protective status is now at risk. Had I spent as much time over the past three years with Haitian or Venezuelan migrants as I have with Ukrainians, I’m sure I would be as enraged over what is happening to them as I am to the Ukrainians. And I am, intellectually speaking. But it’s different when you know people.

When I read the news this morning, I thought of a dozen people I know personally and have worked with. I wrote texts to check in on people and made sure they talked to their lawyers—if they had them.

Marichka seemed typically cheerful: “Interesting which country is my next target: probably Belgium bc of EU,” she wrote. “Will tell them I was deported bc I am Ukrainian. 😅”

My rage on her behalf, by contrast, will take a while to subside.

The Situation continues tomorrow.