Administration officials said they are still working out the details of how Ukrainians will be received, but their goal is to receive them up to 100,000. They would be brought to the United States through a variety of legal routes, including the conventional US refugee program, as well as more agile mechanisms such as the “humanitarian probation” that the Biden administration used last year for tens of thousands of Afghans during Operation Allies Welcome, officials said. who spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules established by the White House.
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Humanitarian parole offers newcomers a temporary work permit but no route to citizenship, unlike the formal U.S. refugee program, which offers more legal benefits and protections.
Biden increased the number of refugees the United States is willing to take in the current fiscal year to 125,000, but his administration is on track to take in just 15,000 due to processing backlogs and what officials are calling pandemic-related restrictions.
Detaining Ukrainians on probation for humanitarian reasons or using other visa channels is probably quicker. White House officials did not give a timeline for reaching the 100,000 goal. They said some Ukrainians are likely to stay temporarily until they can return home.
More than 3 million people have had to flee Ukraine; more than half are children. Their parents try to declare war on them. (Zoeann Murphy/Washington Post)
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, hailed the government’s announcement as an example of “global humanitarian leadership”.
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She urged US officials to quickly speed up refugee processing and expedite family reunification visas, which would allow Ukrainian Americans to bring their relatives over.
“We’ll have to see how the White House sees the breakdown of those numbers and what resources and staff it’s going to deploy to meet what we don’t see as a cap but a target of 100,000,” said Vignarajah, whose organization has relocated to 5,000 Ukrainians in the last decade, about a quarter of all Ukrainians resettled in the United States during this period.
Biden – who is in Brussels on Thursday and parts of Friday for meetings with NATO, the Group of Seven and European Union leaders – will also provide more than $1 billion in humanitarian aid to those affected by the war, as well as announce more than $11 billion over the next five years to help address food safety threats.
The arrival of 100,000 Ukrainians would be one of the largest resettlement operations in US history, but the number is a relatively small part of the more than 3.6 million displaced by the Russian invasion, according to the latest United Nations estimates.
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These Ukrainian refugees have been largely welcomed in neighboring European countries, where the European Union has issued a directive allowing all Ukrainians within the bloc to travel visa-free, work and have access to public education, housing and health care for a year .
By comparison, refugees fleeing other conflicts, including those in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, have encountered significant barriers to accessing safe haven in neighboring countries and in Europe.
In recent weeks, hundrets of Ukrainians have traveled to Mexico, where visas are not required, and then attempted to enter the United States at ports of entry along the US southern border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has allowed them entry on a case-by-case basis with humanitarian parole. Many appear to be joining relatives already living in the United States.
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On Monday, Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called on the West to set up an “airlift” to make it easier for refugees to flee.
Baerbock said she expects the upcoming effort to be the largest relocation process since World War II. Despite rocket and artillery fire pounding every region of Ukraine, established humanitarian corridors for Ukrainians to flee the country continue to function.
A US official said the aim of US and European officials is to spread the refugees across the West – including across the Atlantic – to avoid overburdening a single country. The US offer to take in 100,000 refugees has grown from a smaller number earlier in the week, another official said.
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Poland, with a population of 38 million, has taken in more than 2 million displaced Ukrainians. The population of the United States is almost nine times that.
In a briefing describing the initiative, the White House said it was working to “expand and develop new programs with a focus on accommodating Ukrainians who have family members in the United States.”
“The United States and the European Union are also closely coordinating to ensure that these efforts and other forms of humanitarian admission or transfer are complementary and provide much-needed assistance to Ukraine’s neighbors,” the document said.
The second part of Biden’s three-day trip, a stop in Poland, will also focus on refugees. Poland, which shares a 330-mile border with Ukraine, has absorbed so far the largest influx of fleeing Ukrainians, and on Friday Biden plans to hold an event in that country to address the refugee crisis, including a meeting with humanitarian aid experts.
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Ukrainians have been well-represented in receiving refugees in the United States for several years, and under President Donald Trump even became the third-largest source of refugees admitted to the United States — a trend refugee advocates and experts pointed to a law of the time of the Cold War, particular preference for religious minorities, including Protestants, from the former Soviet Union and Trump’s greater dislike for Muslim refugees and Muslim immigrants in general.
The United States took in more than 1,900 Ukrainian refugees during Trump’s last year in office — about 16 percent of the total number of refugees taken in.
By contrast, critics say, the United States has taken in relatively few refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and other war-torn areas. In the past 17 months – even before the start of the Ukraine conflict and when the Biden administration ended the 20-year war in Afghanistan – the United States took in more Ukrainian refugees (1,495) than Afghan refugees (1,005) according to the data of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Overall, a much larger number of Afghans have immigrated to the United States in recent years, most of them on special immigrant visas reserved for Afghans who have worked for the US mission in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration also brought more than 76,000 Afghans to the United States after its chaotic pullout from Afghanistan last summer, but refugee advocates have urged the administration to do more. Tens of thousands of Afghans with ties to the United States have been left behind, advocates say, and the vast majority of those evacuees to the United States have only been granted temporary protective status as humanitarian probation officers.
John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report.