Baumgartner voices support for Ukrainian refugees as Trump considers revoking their legal status
When Maksym Bedenko arrived in the United States three years ago, he was told, “Welcome to safety.” If Bedenko, his wife and three children were forced out of the United States now, no one would say the same at the Ukrainian border.
The family escaped war-torn Kharkiv in 2022 as the Russian military destroyed much of the city and country they loved.
Three years after coming to Spokane, the family has found stability. The kids are in school. Maksym opened a barbershop. They have found community in church.
But as President Donald Trump considers whether to revoke legal status for Ukrainian refugees, Bedenko is worried and uncertain for the future.
“I know now my kids are in safety and in safety in future because they have future here. In Ukraine, they don’t have future,” he said Friday afternoon.
Reuters reported on Thursday – citing four unnamed sources, including one Trump administration official – that the president was planning to revoke legal status and make the Ukrainians subject to deportation.
In a post Thursday on X, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the Reuters report “fake news” and said the truth was that “no decision has been made at this time.” Soon after that, the president confirmed that he was considering the move but hadn’t made up his mind.
“We’re not looking to hurt anybody, we’re certainly not looking to hurt them, and I’m looking at that,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday, when they asked if he would deport the Ukrainians. “There were some people that think that’s appropriate, and some people don’t, and I’ll be making the decision pretty soon.”
According to Valeriy Goloborodko, Ukraine’s honorary consul in Washington state, about 30,000 Ukrainians have settled in the Evergreen State since Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country three years ago.
“When I read this news, I was grieving,” Goloborodko said in an interview. “I was grieving for the people of Ukraine who came to this country in search of refuge. Many of them lost everything. Many of them are from territories that are occupied by Russia right now, and they lost their houses over there.”
In a statement on Friday, Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane said supporting the roughly 240,000 Ukrainians who have fled to the United States since Russia invaded their country in 2022 is in the best interest of U.S. national security.
“Since the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, thousands of Ukrainians have fled their country and made Eastern Washington their home,” Baumgartner said. “They’ve come to join our growing Ukrainian community. While I respect President Trump’s skill as a negotiator, and understand that his public stance may be a strategic move to push President Zelenskyy to sign the mineral rights agreement, we must not forget that Ukrainian refugees are fleeing a devastating war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and are the very definition of what it means to be a refugee.”
Spokane pastor Boris Borisov, whose family was part of the first wave of Slavic refugees fleeing a collapsing Soviet Union, thanked Baumgartner for his words of support.
“I felt worried, but confident that we as a Slavic community in Spokane can make our voices heard, because we’ve been here for 30 years,” he said. “I can’t control the White House. I can’t influence that, but I’m thankful to God that we live in a country where I can email my Congress representative and then they’re immediately responsive. They put out a statement to support us.”
In an interview, Baumgartner said it’s important that Americans “don’t lose sight of the basic fact that it’s in our strategic interest” to support refugees of war, contrasting the Ukrainians with other immigrants whom, he said, “the Biden administration allowed to abuse the refugee settlement process, that were mainly simply economic migrants.”
“We do want the United States to be a place that does welcome legitimate war refugees, in line with our national security interests,” Baumgartner said. “And obviously this has a specific resonance, or is a special issue for Eastern Washington, because we do have a significant Ukrainian community here.”
Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, seizing the territory of Crimea and small parts of the eastern Ukraine, where fighting continued despite a ceasefire signed later that year that, which Russia violated in early 2015.
Bedenko, who attends Borisov’s church, had been prepared to flee his home since hostilities broke out in 2014.
“From 2014 on, you could feel a kind of spirit of war being present. From that time we had our luggage ready to go,” Bedenko said in Russian, speaking through Borisov as a translator.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Bedenko and his family fled the county to Finland . Once his family was safe, Bedenko returned to Ukraine to help with evacuation efforts. Within the year, the family traveled to Spokane, where a family friend sponsored them.
When they arrived in the United States, Bedenko’s three children were 6, 9 and 15.
“My youngest, who is now 9 – he’s more American than he is Ukrainian. My younger two kids, I can already see it’s easier for them to speak in English than Ukrainian. They have just fully adapted to the culture,” he said.
If Bedenko’s legal status is revoked, his family would try everything it could not to return to Ukraine.
“I would be knowingly bringing my kids into a very unsafe situation, he said. “I will not do it.”
But even seeking refugee status in another country would be “hugely damaging” to his children, Bedenko said.
“My kids would go through that all again,” he said. “They would have to completely forget what it was to be American, be uprooted and go through that whole change again. Adults take it differently. It can be hard but imagine how much harder it is for kids. It would take a long time to get them back to where they are now.”
Even if peace returns to Ukraine, Bedenko and his family hope to remain in the United States. Only once his children were grown would he consider returning.
“For the sake of my kids, we would like to stay in the U.S.,” he said.
Mariia Mykhailenko is also a Ukranian refugee in Spokane. When escaping Ukraine in 2022, she received help from Thrive International and she now serves as the finance and operations manager for the Spokane-based nonprofit, which was founded in 2021 to support immigrants in the region. Many other refugees she works with are afraid their status could be revoked.
“They are stressed because if sent back, they don’t know where they would go,” she said. “We are human. It is not a game. We are not a ball, a toy. We want to have a normal and stable life.”
The 2014 ceasefire, which Russia violated in January 2015, was at the center of a fracas in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, when Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – who has repeatedly thanked Americans for supporting his country – of being ungrateful and unwilling to end the war.
After the unprecedented diplomatic meltdown – which derailed the signing of a deal, whose details are reportedly evolving, that would increase U.S. investment in Ukraine – Baumgartner called for Zelenskyy to step down and allow an interim leader to take over until Ukraine can hold elections.
But in the interview on Friday, Baumgartner said he disagrees with the Trump administration’s decision to pause aid to Ukraine and stop sharing intelligence with the country, adding that such cooperation shouldn’t be conditioned on Zelenskyy’s resignation.
“My own view is that Zelenskyy has shown himself to be unreliable, and he needs to regain trust,” the congressman said. “I do not want to see Russian aggression succeed in Ukraine, because it makes World War III more likely, and I don’t want Russian troops on the Polish border and a repeat of the mistakes of the 20th century.”
On Friday, Trump posted on his social media platform that he is “strongly considering” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until Moscow negotiates a peace deal with Ukraine. That was an apparent reversal after the American president repeated Russian talking points by calling the democratically elected Zelenskyy, who has said he would step down if it meant peace for his nation, a “dictator.”
On Jan. 28, in response to an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services halted the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed Ukrainians to enter the United States legally with the support of American sponsors. Those immigrants were protected by a program called humanitarian parole for up to two years, after which they have been eligible for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows them to live and work in the country legally.
The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for immigrants from Venezuela and Haiti, two of the 17 countries whose citizens are eligible for the program intended for people who can’t safely return home because of war, natural disasters or other dangers.
Goloborodko, who was appointed honorary consul by Ukraine’s foreign ministry in 2014 and frequently meets with U.S. elected officials in the Northwest, said he believes most Americans share the same values as Ukrainians and understand that Russia started the war – despite Trump suggesting the opposite on Feb. 18.
He said his message for Americans is that they have the power to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees by reaching out – “in a polite way, because we don’t want confrontation” – to their elected representatives and to the White House.