Ukrainian Refugee Students Face Uncertainty As TPS Deadline Nears

Seventeen-year-old Yeva didn’t know any English when she moved to New York City with her mother almost four years ago. After fleeing their hometown, Obukhiv—a small city in Ukraine just 30 miles from Kyiv— he two were approved to come to the U.S. under the Uniting for Ukraine program and would be starting over from scratch.

Her first night here, Yeva felt out of place. “I didn’t know anything, so it was very scary and hard to admit that this is the new reality,” she said. But over the next few months, Yeva worked tirelessly to adapt.

She filled the wall next to her bed with sticky notes, on which she wrote English words she didn’t know. Anytime she heard a word in a show or a movie that she hadn’t learnt, a new note would go up.

Now, Yeva is at the top of the senior class at Saint George Academy, a private Catholic school in the East Village that has taught and provided financial aid to dozens of Ukrainian refugee students over the years. With graduation in sight, she dreams that by this time next year, she’ll be enrolled in classes at the University of Southern California.

However, like many of her fellow Ukrainian refugee peers, the future has become clouded. On October 19, Ukraine’s Temporary Protected Status in the U.S. is set to end, just under five years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is intended to aid refugees from countries deemed unsafe to return to, a designation decided by the Department of Homeland Security. Currently, an estimated 101,000 Ukrainians are living in the U.S. under TPS, which shields them from deportation and grants them work authorization. Once a country’s TPS expires, those protections end.

Despite bipartisan calls for a renewal of Ukraine’s TPS, the Trump administration has been silent as the deadline approaches, throwing many Ukrainian refugees into a panic.

“If all these work authorizations and the temporary statuses suddenly dissolve, and you have no place to go, you have no money to get there, what do you do?” asked Andrew Stasiw, the principal of Saint George Academy.

The school has seen it happen already. In January 2025, the Trump administration suspended the Uniting for Ukraine program, leaving many families to scramble to get approved for TPS.

“It’s made everybody very insecure,” Stasiw said. “In a lot of cases, they’re somewhat paralyzed.”

Parents sometimes come and ask Stasiw, who is Ukrainian American, what they can do. Often, he said, he doesn’t have an answer.

Yeva and her mother were able to switch to TPS. However, that option is no longer reliable either.

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” Yeva said. “We just hope that next year there is still going to be TPS.”

Now, some families are wondering if they will need to leave the country altogether. Stasiw said that he is disappointed that it has come to this.

“It’s a win-win for this country to have at least my kids and the families that I’ve met here,” Stasiw said. “They’re compassionate, they’re giving, they’re law-abiding, they really care about this country.”

Last year, Stasiw estimates Ukrainian refugees represented roughly 65 percent of the student body, which has been the school’s highest amount. Saint George Academy is uniquely prepared for Ukrainian refugee students; many of the teachers speak Ukrainian, and the school understands and does its best to provide support to students facing instability.

In spite of hardships, Stasiw said that Ukrainian refugee students excel in school. Two years ago, the school’s highest-scoring English Regents exam was taken by a refugee student who had only started learning English in 2022. Last year, another refugee student earned a perfect score on the chemistry Regents.

“These kids are brainiacs,” Stasiw said. “It elevates my other students.”

Some of them are juggling jobs along with school and extracurriculars, including Dymtro, a sophomore who works at a meat market on Saturdays.

Others are grappling with the question of what happens when their parents’ work authorization expires.

“It’s a really tense question because I probably would start working more after school to help my mom to pay for food, for rent, for school,” said Jane, a junior, who is in the U.S. with her mother under TPS.

Jane moved to the city from Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2022. Though she wants to return one day to help the country rebuild, she hopes she will keep the opportunity to stay in the U.S. for now.

“A lot of Ukrainians like myself have a certain amount of faith that the government is more than just a few players and that stronger minds will prevail, and there will be some kind of last-minute save,” Stasiw said. “If we don’t get the last-minute save, I would probably lose students because a lot of Ukrainian families do not want to break the law.”

Dymtro, who is originally from Kherson, Ukraine, is used to moving around. After the full-scale invasion began, he lived in Poland and Slovakia before moving to the U.S. in 2024. He said he has switched schools eight times since the war intensified.

Though Dymtro has fully adapted to U.S. culture and loves living here, he said it wouldn’t be a problem if they have to leave because he knows he’ll have the chance to come back one day.

“But I don’t wanna move out because of my mom, because she got used to it here,” Dymtro said. “I haven’t seen her with her friends since the war started. And now I look at her, she’s happy because she has a friend who she can go out with and hang out.”

Dymtro and his mother are currently in the U.S. under Uniting for Ukraine, but their two-year parole is set to expire soon, and they hope to get approved for TPS. His sister and her husband, who also live in the U.S., are going through the process of applying now. After six months, they still haven’t heard anything.

The biggest question on students’ minds is where their families will go if they have to leave, as returning to Ukraine is not an option; the war is continuing to intensify, and around 20% of Ukraine’s territory is currently under Russian occupation, including where Dymtro’s father is. At the same time, they know visa and work authorization issues will follow them elsewhere.

“It’s scary because we don’t know what to do after this,” Dymtro said. “If we would have to leave the United States, we don’t have anywhere to go. That’s the problem.”