Vitalii and Yana, both Ukrainian refugees in Lancaster County, listen to Dima Savienkov of Westfield, MA, as they attend church at Brickerville Grace Fellowship in Lititz on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025. The couple are now facing uncertain times after Trump immigration policies have started taking place across the nation.
Suzette Wenger / LNP | LancasterOnline
Suzette Wenger / LNP | LancasterOnline
Vitalii and Yana, both Ukrainian refugees in Lancaster County, listen to Dima Savienkov of Westfield, MA, as they attend church at Brickerville Grace Fellowship in Lititz on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025. The couple are now facing uncertain times after Trump immigration policies have started taking place across the nation.
Sipping coffee in a bustling church basement in Lititz on a Sunday afternoon, Vitalii and Yana are a long way from the village in Ukraine where they grew up.
Vitalii and Yana are two of the thousands of Ukrainians in Pennsylvania who face an uncertain future after the Trump administration halted a humanitarian program to help people affected by the 2022 Russian invasion.
Vitalii would speak only on the condition LNP | LancasterOnline not use his last name because of concerns for his family’s safety. With the help of an interpreter, Vitalii, speaking Russian, explained that he never imagined he would leave Ukraine, not even after Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Living near Chernivtsi, in the southwest of Ukraine, the couple remained far from the Crimean conflict zone. But in February 2022, the war came to them.
“There were rockets flying into our city, not far from our house,” Vitalii said. Yana, his wife, added, “The children were very afraid.”
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In January 2023, the couple resettled in the United States, part of the 117,000 Ukrainians who came to the U.S. through the Uniting for Ukraine program. The program, initiated by the Biden administration shortly after Russia invaded, allows American families to sponsor Ukrainians as they get situated in the U.S.
With a sponsor family in Lancaster County, Vitalii said, he and Yana moved to Brecknock Township. Vitalii, an electrician, was able to find work in his field. Their children attended school in the Eastern Lancaster School District. They started attending Brickerville Grace Fellowship Church, where services are in Russian and English, and they met others who have resettled in the region.
“We feel comfortable in this church,” Vitalii said. “We’ve made friends here.”
In October, the family applied for a two-year extension to their status. However, their applications were not processed by the time Trump took office, and the Trump administration has since paused the program.
Suzette Wenger / LNP | LancasterOnline
Svetlana Kalash of Reading speaks English as Rev. Yaroslav Mantsevich translates in Russian at Brickerville Grace Fellowship in Lititz during the service on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025.
As a result, on Jan. 26, all of their legal documents expired, Vitalii said. That includes the document showing their “humanitarian parole” status, which allows them to remain in the U.S.
It also includes work permits, which means that Vitalii, Yana and their daughter, who recently graduated high school and was working at Walmart, all lost their jobs within days of one another. He estimates that the family has two months of savings left before they’ll be unable to make their rent payment.
“Right now, I’m sitting at home,” Vitalii said. “Without work authorization, no one is going to hire me.”
Their legal status is also tied to their Pennsylvania drivers licenses, he noted. “We drive the minimum amount possible,” he said. “We call our friends to go to the grocery store, because we don’t want to get in trouble.”
“It’s a very unclear situation,” Vitalii said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
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Laura Stammberger is a volunteer from Lititz who was a parole case manager at Bethany Christian Services. She lost her job when the organization closed its refugee services program last summer, but the 65-year-old fluent Russian speaker has continued to help people from Russia and Ukraine as a volunteer.
Stammberger had been connecting Ukrainians to a counselor at Church World Service Lancaster. But earlier this month, Stammberger noted, the Trump administration cut funds to CWS, effectively shuttering its immigration counseling assistance program.
“We heard that the Trump administration is taking away the parole and [temporary protective status] from other countries, so it’s hard to know what they will decide with Ukrainians,” she said.
Stammberger estimated that a few hundred families in Lancaster, and thousands across Pennsylvania, soon will be in a similar situation.
“Some of the people who have come have been traumatized by hearing bombs constantly,” Stammberger said. “One person was taken prisoner in Mariupol and was in custody with prisoners of war for four months. Other people had a cold reception in Poland and Germany and just wanted a safe, quiet place where they could work and their children could go to school.”
Suzette Wenger / LNP | LancasterOnline
Laura Stammberger of Lititz, listens as she translates for Vitalii and Yana, both Ukrainian refugees in Lancaster County, as they speak with a reporter after attending church at Brickerville Grace Fellowship in Lititz on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025. The couple are now facing uncertain times after Trump immigration policies have started taking place across the nation.
The office of Democratic Sen. John Fetterman did not respond to a request for this story. Meghan Rodgers, spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, said the senator’s office can’t speak about specific constituent cases, but encourages people to reach out if in need of assistance with their legal status.
A spokesperson for Republican Congressman Lloyd Smucker said nobody has contacted the lawmaker’s office recently about the United for Ukraine program, “however, our office has previously helped many individuals in Pennsylvania’s 11th Congressional District with the program.”
“Our office is here to assist constituents with all federal agencies, and we urge any resident of Pennsylvania’s 11th Congressional District to contact our office for assistance.”
Smucker’s office said Ukrainians may apply for asylum using Form I-589, and “humanitarian parole is still an option for individuals in certain circumstances who are seeking to enter the United States, via Form I-131.”
However, Stammberger said that people fleeing war generally are not eligible for asylum because it’s not their own government persecuting them.
“There have been a couple of Ukrainian families who have applied for asylum, but I don’t know what the basis is,” Stammberger said. “My friend from Mariupol consulted with an immigration attorney and she was told as long as she could live in another part of Ukraine, she wouldn’t be eligible for asylum in the United States.”
As for humanitarian parole, Stammberger said it is granted in very rare cases, and as Smucker’s office notes, it is meant for people not already living in the U.S.
“I think even for congressional staffers it’s difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on, and they might not know that the USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) has been told to pause all work on behalf of Ukrainian Humanitarian Parolees,” she said.
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It’s not just Ukrainians facing this uncertainty, said Griffin Durling, Immigration Legal Services Program Manager at Church World Service Lancaster. It also includes people in the U.S. on temporary protective status from Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.
People whose statuses have expired face a “real risk” of being deported in accordance with a recent U.S. Department of Homeland Security “expedited removal” memo, Durling said.
“Expedited removal basically allows immigration enforcement who encounter folks who have been in the United States and have been here less than two years to remove them without going through immigration court proceedings,” Durling said. “And they included in that memo, should ICE agents encounter parolees, for example, they could seek, in their discretion, to terminate that individual’s parole.”
This has been alarming to people in the U.S. from Ukraine, who were welcomed into the country and followed a legal pathway to get here, Durling said.
Now, he said, some are feeling pressure to leave. “I’m hearing from the Ukrainian community a sense of hopelessness,” Durling said. “A lot of this is causing people to rethink their futures here in the United States.”
At Brickerville Grace Fellowship Church, Pastor Yaroslav Mantsevich said five families at the church are currently in the same situation as Vitalii and Yana.
Mantsevich came to the U.S. from Ukraine in the mid-1990s and helped found the church in 2001. He explained that he has both Russians and Ukrainians in the congregation, but a lot more families have come to the church from Ukraine since the war began.
The church community is doing what it can to connect these families to food and other resources, Mantsevich said. But people would rather be working and contributing to the community.
“They went in legally,” Mantsevich said. “They have a legal right, so they should have authorization to work. Why let them come in but then not let them work?”
Sholtis’s work is funded by the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund. For more information, or to make a contribution, please visit lanc.news/supportlocaljournalism.
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