Racial disparities within the American immigration system renew calls for equitable parole programs
Uniting for Ukraine demonstrates the capability of the U.S. immigration system to create a program that benefits migrants fleeing atrocities in their home countries. However, equity still lacks among other parole programs for different immigrant groups.
By: Nicole Chiarella
The building doesn’t stand out. It’s a beige-stained structure with a seemingly infinite amount of windows that don’t suggest any movement behind them. 26 Federal Plaza blends into the landscape of Lower Manhattan. Multiple layers of barricades seal the building’s main entrance off from visitors, instead redirecting them to a security guard around the corner, who stands at their post under yards of scaffolding.
It’s here that immigrants seeking a new life in the United States will have their fates decided through court proceedings. Beyond 26 Federal Plaza, looming not-so-far in the background, stands the Freedom Tower.
The number of migrants apprehended by officials at the country’s southern border surpassed record highs this last year, with more than 2.3 million such encounters. Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan migrants constitute nearly a quarter of all crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border, as they flee economic and political upheaval in their home countries.
In response to the unprecedented increase, the Biden administration instituted an immigration parole program aimed toward facilitating the “safe and orderly” entry for migrants hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. To qualify for this program, migrants — beneficiaries — must have a supporter in the U.S., possess an unexpired passport and undergo a rigorous vetting process, among other eligibility requirements. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of facilitating the process, has capped the number of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants allowed to enter every month at up to 30,000 individuals.
Patrick Giuliani, a policy analyst at the Hope Border Institute — a Catholic nonprofit organization in Texas whose work centers on research and policy advocacy for immigrants — notes that migrants seeking to receive Temporary Protected Status through the CHNV parole program cannot present themselves at the U.S. border without authorization.
“CHNV has a lot of these ineligibility requirements baked into the program,” Giuliani explains. “If someone crosses into Panama, Mexico or the U.S. without authorization, they’re immediately ineligible for the program. For the CHNV program, you have to be able to fly into the country.”
These stipulations serve in stark contrast to Uniting for Ukraine, an immigration parole program designed to provide TPS for Ukrainian citizens coming to the U.S. fleeing the war between Russia and Ukraine that started in 2022. The war has claimed roughly 354,000 lives since it began more than a year ago, and leaked U.S. documents state that Ukraine has suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The International Criminal Court in Hague has also accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of committing war crimes and has issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader. The war spurred massive migration movements within and out of Ukraine: Ukraine currently has one of the highest populations of displaced persons in the world at 5.9 million people.
For Vitalli Desiatnychenko, 31, who arrived to the U.S. more than ten years ago, the war in Ukraine meant the separation of his family. While he was able to bring his mother and cousin to the U.S. through Uniting for Ukraine, his father was unable to leave Ukraine as men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not permitted to leave the country. Desiatnychenko has not seen his father since the war began.
“Last year when the war started, my whole family was still back in Ukraine,” Desiatnychenko recalls. “It was very hard for the first couple months. It’s obviously still hard, but my mind has adjusted to that. My mind went from denial to, I guess, acceptance. We just have to deal with the new normal these days.”
Desiatnychenko works as the operations manager at Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant located in the heart of Little Ukraine in the East Village. In front of the restaurant’s exterior, pedestrians will see images of Ukrainian flags painted on the sidewalk with phrases that read “Slava Ukraini,” which translates to “Glory to Ukraine.” Stepping inside Veselka, the Ukrainian pride is palpable. Ukrainian flags and memorabilia decorate its interior. Employees wear shirts that say, “Our Hearts Beet for Ukraine.” An artistic portrait of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy sits high on a shelf.
Mariia Khorun, 34, works as an immigration lawyer on behalf of Razom, a Ukrainian advocacy organization whose building is located a few steps down the block from Veselka. Khorun, born in the eastern part of Ukraine, emigrated to the U.S. twelve years ago. Though she began her career as a business attorney, the war led her to shift her focus to immigration; she currently provides immigration and employment assistance to Ukrainian nationals coming to New York City through Uniting for Ukraine.
Khorun’s parents remained in eastern Ukraine and had just finished renovating their apartment when the Russian invasion began. While her parents were reluctant to leave, the pending birth of their grandson served as motivation for them to come to the U.S. through Uniting for Ukraine. When the war started, Khorun had been in the second trimester of her pregnancy.
“For them to leave all of their belongings is one thing, but life, memories, was unthinkable,” she says. “But God had different plans.”
The Biden administration set up Uniting for Ukraine less than two months after the start of the war. Nearly 300,000 Ukrainian refugees have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration first implemented the program. Unlike the CHNV parole program, there is no monthly limit on the number of Ukrainian immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. through Uniting for Ukraine. Additionally, any Ukrainians that present themselves at the U.S. border without authorization may be denied entry and instead instructed to apply to the Uniting for Ukraine program, though it would not make them ineligible for the program. The pace at which the U.S. instituted the Uniting for Ukraine program has taken lawyers aback, including Nora Margaret Anderson, a New York-based immigration lawyer who specializes in work visas. Anderson recognizes the disparities between Uniting for Ukraine and other parole programs and believes the former should be treated as the gold standard moving forward.
“The United States has started similar parole programs for other countries,” Anderson states. “Fantastic step in the right direction. But it doesn’t replace the asylum system […] I think so much of what the United States has done and is doing needs to be compared to how we’re treating Ukrainian displaced persons.”
The overwhelming support for the Uniting for Ukraine program is also demonstrated through increased state and federal funding for organizations providing assistance to displaced Ukrainian nationals. Jessica Brecker is the Associate Director of Resettlement at Catholic Charities Community Services, an organization that offers case management, unemployment and immigration services to individuals with varying immigration statuses through programs funded on state, federal and private levels. Catholic Charities works with immigrants from more than 70 countries, including Ukraine and Venezuela, as well as other countries within Central and South America and the Middle East. Brecker pinpoints the increase in financial support from the government allocated to programs assisting Ukrainian refugees.
“There has been extreme federal and state funding channeled to the resettlement organizations to support the Ukrainian folks — the most funding we’ve ever gotten,” Brecker said.
In addition to a rise in funds for these types of programs, the process of applying to sponsor a Ukrainian refugee has been simplified through Uniting for Ukraine, allowing for a relatively smooth process for a beneficiary to come to the U.S. Sponsors must have legal status and provide proof they can support their beneficiaries financially and meet their needs for health care and education, among others.
“The program is very easy to take part of,” Desiatnychenko recalls. “Filling out paperwork was something I could do on my own. Overall, the whole process is very easy.”
Immigrants arriving to the U.S. under the CHNV program can now receive TPS and its associated benefits, like their Ukrainian counterparts. However, the journey of some Venezuelan immigrants to TPS was marred by delays and denials. One immigrant, Angelica — who requested to be referred to by only her first name due to ongoing immigration court proceedings — recounted how it took an entire year for her to receive an update from USCIS informing her that they had just begun to review her TPS application. Angelica, 22, and her family previously applied for asylum twice in the past eight years, with both applications having been denied. (Angelica is currently appealing her asylum case to a higher court in Washington, D.C.)
“I have lived in the U.S. for twenty years, so basically my entire life,” she says. “We’ve been in the immigration process for that long.”
Samuel Molina, like Angelica, also recently got approved for TPS. Molina, 19, said that he received TPS fairly quickly and had been living in the U.S. undocumented prior to gaining that status. Having applied for asylum roughly seven years ago, Molina and his family have yet to hear back from immigration services with an update. The process has taken so long that Molina’s mother jokes that he will probably end up getting his citizenship through marriage.
“I think ‘very tedious’ is undermining how difficult it is,” Molina comments. “It’s not even the paperwork that we have to do, but it’s more how much backlog there is and how much the U.S. government doesn’t want to document these people, rather than these people aren’t trying.”
Molina’s and Angelica’s experiences trying to receive TPS alludes to the systematic racism built into U.S. immigration policies. The U.S. has a history of enacting discriminatory immigration policies that prioritize a certain shade of color. Beginning with the Naturalization Act of 1790, this body of legislation first defined eligibility criteria for U.S. citizenship: be a free, white, land-owning male. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, signed by President Chester A. Arthur, instituted an absolute ban on Chinese workers emigrating to the U.S. for 10 years. A mutual agreement between the U.S. and Japan in the 20th century, termed the Gentleman’s Agreement, banned the entry of most Japanese immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1924 placed quotas on the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. based on their national origin. This piece of legislation also required that immigrants aged 16 and older pass a literacy test and created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that prevented the entry of migrants from that designated area — excluding Filipinos, who were considered U.S. nationals since the Philippines were, at the time, a U.S. colony.
Centuries of racially charged immigration policies culminated in a still-unsolved battle affecting migrants at the border and throughout the U.S. Former President Barack Obama’s record of immigrant removals outpaced those of his predecessors. According to data published by the Migration Policy Institute in 2017, the number of total deportations during the Obama Administration were nearly half that of President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. However, Obama’s number of removals exceeded three million — an increase by at least one million from his predecessors’ levels. The rate of removals seen under the Obama administration ultimately dubbed the 44th U.S. president as the “Deporter-in-Chief.”
“Worst yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate,” President Obama writes in his memoir, “A Promised Land.” “This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records.”
President Obama has a fairly complicated legacy with immigration. Though removals during his presidency surpassed three million, President Obama also issued an executive order called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012 after the DREAM Act failed to garner enough votes in the Senate. This executive order prevented the removal of individuals brought to the U.S. as a child who did not have U.S. citizenship or legal residency. DACA provides its recipients — referred to as Dreamers — with work authorization, opportunities for in-state tuition, and employer-based health insurance, however, it does not offer a pathway to citizenship.
“How was I,” President Obama asks, “to weigh that risk against the urgent fates of the young people I’d met — the uncertainty and fear they were forced to live with every single day, the possibility that with no notice any one of them might be rounded up in an ICE raid, detained in a cell, and shipped off to a land that was as foreign to them as it would be to me?”
Since its inception, DACA has faced numerous challenges from courts seeking to undermine and eliminate the program. Former President Donald Trump attempted to end DACA, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his termination of the program in a victory for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants protected by Obama’s executive order. Throughout the Trump presidency, his administration faced accusations of human rights violations in their treatment of immigrants, including the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents and the alleged forced hysterectomies of Spanish-speaking women at an ICE detention center in Georgia. By the conclusion of his presidency, Trump decreased legal immigration by 49%.
Matias Gonzalez, an immigration lawyer whose caseload deals with asylum claims, recalls the way in which the Trump administration instituted more restrictions on adjudications, with the aim of removing higher numbers of undocumented migrants from the U.S.
“Trump’s administration took a very hands-on approach to [remove] anyone that is here not lawfully present,” Gonzalez said.
Giuliani recognizes the fact that structural racism is inherent in the U.S. immigration system, and for the U.S. to reconcile its exclusionary past, it must come to terms with it — which Giuliani admits is a difficult yet necessary obligation for America to fulfill. He questions if the current U.S. immigration system is one the U.S. should be proud of.
“This disparity on the U.S. deciding who is a worthy migrant comes into this conversation where it has these racial issues,” he notes. “It has these political ties; it has these undertones of socioeconomic class. It has all these other issues that we all see in society at large being tied in, and it has a long history going back to the foundation of this country.”
Despite disparities between Uniting for Ukraine and the CHNV parole program, Andres Castellanos, a 22-year-old Venezuelan immigrant living in Miami, admires the programs’ successes. He believes the key issue lies with the U.S. having the ability to construct these sorts of programs but not applying their resources and efforts equitably to other groups of immigrants.
“It’s good to see that there is a way to make things better, and then it should be applied equally to other immigrant groups as well,” Castellanos, a University of Miami student, says.
Angelica also appreciates the good that has come out of the Uniting for Ukraine program and the support it has provided to Ukrainian refugees fleeing terrible circumstances. She does, however, suggest that these programs may be politically motivated to advance U.S. interests.
“What does it mean for the U.S. — who has had, since the 1950s, this political ideological war with Russia — to be taking in such large and generous quantities of the Ukrainian people?” she asks.
Political agendas can influence programs like Uniting for Ukraine, and it’s a concern Khorun has for the future of the program. While TPS lasts for up to two years, Khorun doesn’t have a definitive answer as to what can happen to TPS holders and Uniting for Ukraine, if a new administration is elected next year.
“We just don’t know what’s going to happen if the executives of this country are not as inclined to help displaced Ukrainians,” Khorun said.
Similarities echo through the stories of immigrants like Desiatnychenko, Khorun, Angelica, Molina and Castellanos, yet no two of their experiences are exactly alike. While the immigration system has serviced them in various ways and to various extents, they each share the pursuit of a better life in the U.S. Though some may feel more hopeful about the future than others, it’s that commonality that unites them as immigrants.
Desiatnychenko hopes for a future in which he sees the reunification of his family and an end to the war on Ukraine. Khorun reflects a similar sentiment; she hopes for Ukraine’s freedom and for the opportunity to take her son to visit her home country. Angelica has come to terms with the uncertainty her immigration status brings to her life. Molina wants the U.S. to treat immigrants equally and understand that an immigrant’s reason for leaving their home country is valid. Castellanos looks forward to a future where he can provide for his family without relying on the U.S. government for work authorization.
The U.S. immigration system is littered with inequities and racial disparities. Programs like Uniting for Ukraine showcase America’s potential to treat immigrants with dignity. It also underscores the importance of implementing parole programs equitably, and the necessity for the U.S. to reconcile their immigration history and extend what has often been a limited sense of respect to other immigrant groups.
“The reality of our U.S. immigration system is that a lot of our stuff on fair and dignified treatment comes because of community efforts,” Giuliani says. “It’s community advocacy efforts; it’s community accountability. It starts with people.”
