One Sunday in the middle of February, Julia got a call from her good friend Viktoria, a fellow Ukrainian immigrant who was 33 weeks pregnant with her third child. Viktoria’s water had just broken. Her husband, Vladislav, couldn’t leave work. Julia sprang into helper mode.

“I was so worried because it was my first time” helping someone who’s about to give birth, Julia said. She brought along a translator to ensure she and Viktoria could understand the English-speaking doctor. She stood by Viktoria’s side, holding her hand and encouraging her through contractions. At the end of the night, Viktoria gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Emily.

Rushing to help other women is a common occurrence for Julia and the other community health workers at a nonprofit organization that helps refugee women and their families in and around Decatur, Georgia, acclimate to their new country. 

In some cases, Julia’s work week extends into the weekend, especially when one of her 40 clients or someone in their families needs translation assistance during a medical emergency, access to transportation or help understanding their insurance coverage.

“Sometimes, my job is 94 hours,” she said. “Our work is very interesting, but it’s so important to help these families.”

Since the early 2000s, the organization has served thousands of refugee and immigrant women by offering workshops, mental health services and networking opportunities. Its leaders asked The 19th to withhold the organization’s name out of concern that using it might jeopardize the funding they receive from the federal government, given the uncertainty of the current political climate. Julia is also going by a name other than her own because she works at the organization, and The 19th agreed to withhold the last name for Viktoria and Vladislav because of their status. 

The organization’s clients are Afghans, who arrived in Georgia in 2021 after the Taliban took over their home country; Central Africans, who were pushed out in large part because of the volatile security situation in their country; and Ukrainians, who fled a war that has been raging for three years.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization bolstered its services to help women immigrants in metro Atlanta who needed to navigate conversations with health care providers. Community health workers had been an early part of the network, and the need for translation services and community connection led the organization to reintroduce the program, the organization’s program coordinator of community health direction told The 19th.

Five years later, community health workers like Julia are the group’s heart. The group serves more than 2,000 women immigrants and refugees each year and having representation is crucial to the work; 90 percent of the organization’s staff are foreign-born.

The community health workers are now more necessary than ever. As the Trump administration implements more obstacles for refugees’ pathways to citizenship and makes changes to the Temporary Protected Services program (TPS), which allows immigrants from certain countries to live in the United States legally for a period of time, many families, including Viktoria’s, are left with fewer options and unsure of what’s ahead.

Ukrainian refugees began arriving in the United States in 2022, when then-President Joe Biden created the Uniting for Ukraine program, granting Ukrainian citizens and their immediate families temporary stay in the country through what is known as humanitarian parole. In 2023, the Biden administration extended humanitarian parole to Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans, both as a form of temporary relief from the unrest and instability in these countries and to curb the number of immigrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico. 

Then came President Donald Trump, who, earlier this year, shortened the length of the protected status granted to these foreign nationals.

Nicaraguans now have protected status until July 5, Haitians have it until August 3 and Venezuelans until September 10, according to guidance from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). What will happen to the program for immigrants from other countries, including Ukraine, is unclear.

The fates of as many as 532,000 people are in limbo, said Judith Delus Montgomery, an immigration lawyer from Clarkston, Georgia, a small city known as the “Ellis Island of the South” due to its welcoming of more than 60,000 refugees since the 1970s. Her firm, Delus Montgomery, LLC, has served thousands of immigrant families in the metro Atlanta area for 13 years, and Montgomery herself has worked closely with the Haitian community.

People are in an uproar. We have been inundated with phone calls.”

Judith Delus Montgomery

Born in the Bahamas to Haitian immigrants, Montgomery said she became a U.S. citizen through her parents when she was a toddler. She said that her personal experience as an immigrant and naturalized citizen inspires her work.

Since the Trump administration announced it would shorten the protections for Haitian immigrants, which would have otherwise ended on February 3, 2026, Montgomery’s days have been filled with anxious phone calls from clients. She has been working around the clock to help them find new ways to stay in the country legally and find other paths to citizenship.

“People are in an uproar,” she said. “We have been inundated with phone calls.”

With the end of their TPS period quickly approaching, immigrants have only two other options to stay in the United States, Montgomery said. They can adjust their status through a family member who is already a citizen or, if that isn’t an option, they can petition for asylum. But that is a tough road to follow. According to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, more than 3 million active cases are pending before the Immigration Court. Of those, more than 2 million are formal asylum applications from immigrants who are awaiting hearings and decisions on their cases. As reported by the National Immigration Forum, the average wait time for asylum applicants to be seen before USCIS is more than six years, and some wait much longer.

A lot of the people living in the United States under temporary protection don’t have a home to go back to. “Now you have all these folks here and don’t have a pathway to citizenship [but] they absolutely can’t go back. These folks are in a precarious situation,” Montgomery said. 

That includes the Ukrainians affected by the Trump administration’s impending changes to their protected status and who can no longer apply for temporary protected status or for the Uniting for Ukraine program. Before leaving office, Biden extended Ukrainians’ stay in the United States until October 2026, but this is likely to change once the Trump administration completes its review of the parole programs, as outlined in the executive action called “Securing Our Borders.”

Reuters estimates that as many as 240,000 Ukrainians have or will be affected by the changes. Julia and Viktoria are among them.

Julia’s life is defined in periods: there’s before the war and then there’s everything that has happened since. 

Before the war, Julia worked in sales and got some experience in the nonprofit space too, in a role where she helped organize games, workshops and training for college students.

She lived in an apartment complex in Lutsk with her parents, brother and nephews. When the war began, she assembled a go-bag — full of medicine, warm clothes, her passport and money — and kept it close at all times in case she had to evacuate.

Day in and day out, Julia traveled to and from work until curfew arrived in the evening. When Russian forces attacked their city, she and her family huddled together in basements, holding each other tightly as they waited for the blaring emergency alarms to end. 

Julia had friends in the United States and they kept encouraging her to take advantage of the humanitarian program and relocate. It was a heartwrenching decision: Her parents didn’t want to leave Ukraine and she didn’t want to leave her parents.

But she did move eventually. Julia arrived in the United States in January 2023, alone. Her parents, brother and nephews stayed in Ukraine. 

Our cases are frozen.”

Julia

During an interview in mid-February at the organization where she works, Julia said that she, like many of her clients, was nervous and stressed about what she needed to do next. Because the Temporary Protected Status program isn’t accepting any new applications, families like Julia’s have been essentially broken up since none of those who stayed in Ukraine are able to legally enter the United States. And at least some of those who have relocated to the United States can’t return home because their homes are now in Russian-occupied areas — Russian soldiers might be eating off their plates, wearing their clothes, sleeping in their bedrooms.

“Our cases are frozen,” Julia said. 

Their lives are frozen.

Then there are couples like Viktoria and Vladislav. She is Ukranian. He is Russian. They were each living in their respective home country when they met on an online dating site for Christians eight years ago. After their pastors gave them the OK to meet in person, the two connected quickly and fell in love. Soon after, Viktoria moved to Russia and she and Vladislav got married.

After the war started, the couple and their first child, a girl, moved to Turkey, where their second child was born. Viktoria didn’t feel safe as a Ukrainian living in Russia, especially after she shared her sentiments on the war on social media. The family lived in Turkey for 11 months. A close friend who lived in the United States told Viktoria and Vladislav about the humanitarian program. In 2023, the parents and their children moved to Dunwoody. 

If the Trump administration forces them to leave, Viktoria and the couple’s middle child aren’t allowed to live in Russia, where Vladislav and the eldest daughter are from, because of their Ukrainian citizenship. In turn, Vladislav and the eldest daughter may not be able to live in Ukraine. Will the youngest child, the one whom Julia watched come into this world, be able to relocate to either country?

“You don’t know what you need to do,” Vladislav said. Emily’s path is less clear cut, he said, “because she’s an American citizen, and American governments don’t recommend going to Ukraine because of the war or Russia because it isn’t safe.”

There’s also a bigger financial implication of Trump’s approach to immigration. Across the country, agencies that help immigrants are struggling to keep their doors open or have laid off staff due to funding cuts.

The organization where Julia works has also been impacted. 

While it isn’t a refugee resettlement agency, the organization’s program coordinator said its social adjustment and economic empowerment services are funded by federal grants that come through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Department of Health and Human Services. These grants, which account for almost half of the organization’s annual funding, are at risk. If they’re gone, cuts are all but inevitable.

These cuts would happen just as the changes to immigration policies under Trump have amplified the need for the types of services the organization offers. With resettlement agencies shutting their doors, the group has received an influx of new clients whose original case managers are no longer available.

As Julia and her fellow community health workers help more and more people, the program coordinator said she has tried to remind them of the importance of self-care. But that can be difficult to balance when it’s not only more clients that they’re seeing, but also clients facing more severe challenges.

In just two weeks, the program coordinator said, the organization had helped more than 100 families get utility assistance, an increase that reflects a surge in housing issues and the number of families the organization has provided services for since the Trump administration began making changes.

As the uncertainty lingers and changes begin to take effect, the program coordinator anticipates an increase in homelessness among the families the organization helps, more difficulty in finding work and exacerbated mental health struggles.

Those who had to leave their native countries and embraced the United States as their home are now realizing their new life isn’t actually safe.

Amid the struggles, the community has banded together to lend a hand. The organization has made room for them by ramping up its volunteer program that delivers food to families. It’s also accepting more donations and it has stepped up its outreach allies to help those who need legal assistance, the program coordinator said.

Julia remembers feeling lost when she first arrived in Atlanta. She missed her family and wanted to go back to Ukraine, but a friend encouraged her to wait a year before making any big decisions. In many ways, it’s her work at the organization that has rooted her in the United States and kept her grounded in these times.

She was taking English as a Second Language courses at Georgia State University when a teacher asked if she’d be interested in connecting with other Ukrainian refugees in the community. She agreed and was hired after her first interview with the organization. Immersing herself in the world of clients — a world so much like her own — was a whirlwind experience, but Julia enjoys helping and connecting with others. As she likes to say, she didn’t find the organization. It found her.

Julia said that as time has passed since Trump announced changes to the Temporary Protected Status program, some of her clients have been getting in contact with lawyers to see what their options might be. Faced with the possibility of uprooting their families and starting their lives over once again, many have been feeling depressed and overwhelmed.

Julia is also contemplating what might happen to her. In January, she applied to continue her Temporary Protected Status, but because cases like hers are paused, she hasn’t heard any updates. Her original stay was set to end April 19.

Every person I’ve met has a deep story of fighting to survive, to help, to support.”

Julia

Depending on what the Trump administration does next, she said, she might return to Ukraine to be with her family or continue her work in Atlanta.

In the meantime, it’s the connection to her community that keeps her going. There’s her friendship with Viktoria, whose family is one of the many that remind her that life in the United States can be beautiful and complicated all the same.

“Every person I’ve met has a deep story of fighting to survive, to help, to support,” she said. “Sometimes life is very easy, but sometimes it’s very complicated and heavy.”

She paused; looked at Viktoria and Vladislav, who were watching their second daughter as she played on the playground outside of the organization’s office; and said, “But this country supports us and I hope this country will continue to support us.”