When her husband Ilkhom left for his Uber shift in late October, he never expected to be arrested by federal immigration agents at O’Hare Airport during Operation Midway Blitz.
Since then, his wife Shakhnoza says he has missed their youngest son’s birthday, Thanksgiving, and now, Christmas.
Last year, the family put up a tree for the holidays. But this December, that same spot in their apartment is bare and there’s a feeling of life interrupted.
Shakhnoza (who requested to not use her and Ilkhom’s full names out of fear of reprisal or arrest) and her three teenage boys sleep on mattresses on the floor in their sparse two-bedroom apartment in a western suburb. They brought little with them when they escaped Ukraine in 2023 — mostly school textbooks and dictionaries, stacked on a single shelf in the living room. They fled after their hometown of Kharkiv near the Russian border came under heavy bombardment and the stall they ran at a local market burned down.
After a winding journey they arrived in the U.S. in July of 2023 through Uniting for Ukraine (U4U), a humanitarian parole program launched by the Biden administration to allow Ukrainians displaced by the war to enter the country legally.
“We thought America supported Ukrainians,” Shakhnoza said in her native Ukrainian. “That’s why we thought it would be safe for the kids.”
Uniting for Ukraine allows Ukrainians to remain in the U.S. for up to two years and grants work authorization. But in January the Trump administration paused the program for new applicants and temporarily halted processing of some immigration benefit requests — including parole extensions and work permits — for Ukrainians already in the country.
For some families, that uncertainty has been compounded by fears of detention as the Trump administration abandons Biden-era immigration policies and ramps up enforcement nationwide.
A federal court later ordered the government to resume processing U4U applications. But the ongoing delays in processing have left hundreds of Ukrainians in the Chicago area without valid work permits or legal protections, says Congressman Mike Quigley, whose office has been fielding calls from affected families.
He said his office is helping some Ukrainian constituents with extension applications that were filed “as far back as a year.”
“The common line we hear is, ‘Without a valid work permit, I can’t work. I can’t renew my driver’s license. We don’t have savings, and we can’t meet basic expenses like rent and food,’” Quigley said.
“They can’t go back to Ukraine due to the ongoing war,” he added, “and they’ve exhausted all their administrative remedies, and they’re just forced to wait.”
Chicago immigration attorney Svitlana Iva-Ugryn said she is representing two Ukrainians who were detained by ICE this fall. Both had entered the country through the Uniting for Ukraine program, she said, and neither had a criminal record. One of her clients had legal status, and their parole was valid until next year. The other client’s parole status had expired, though they had applied for an extension.
“People are stranded,” Iva-Ugrym said. “‘They’re saying, ‘How could it happen? We didn’t violate the law, we came here to be protected, and now, we’re treated as though we did something wrong.’”
‘We had nothing else to lose’
When Shakhnoza heard explosions in the early morning of Feb. 24, 2022, she thought they were fireworks. “We thought someone was celebrating something,” she said. Little did she know that it was the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
While hundreds of thousands fled the country in the early days of the war, Shakhnoza said her family stayed in Kharkiv, where she and her husband ran an underwear shop at the Barabashovo Market — one of the largest markets in Eastern Europe.
Then, in mid-March, Russian missiles hit Barabashovo. Ilkhom was in a Telegram channel with other market vendors who shared videos of the damage. That’s how he learned that their shop was among those destroyed.
After they lost the store, Shakhnoza said, “we had nothing else to lose.”
“I have no profession, my husband doesn’t either,” Shakhnoza said. “We only had this store at the market. We could only work there to make a living. That’s why when we heard about the [Uniting for Ukraine] program, I found an organization that helped me apply.”
‘They feel safe here’
Shakhnoza said her sons were eager to return to the classroom in the U.S. once they arrived in July of 2023. Their school had shuttered on the very first day of the war, and the boys had spent over a year studying remotely.
The transition was difficult at first. The boys were homesick, she said, and they struggled with their English in school.
“But they adapted,” she said. “They have friends now. “They feel safe here.”
Shakhnoza and Ilkhom adapted, too.
Ilkhom began working as an Uber driver. Shakhnoza found a job at a big box store. Over the summer, the family even took a short vacation to a nearby lake.
Shaknoza and Ilkhom had never been to a beach before, so they didn’t know to bring sunscreen with them. Shakhnoza says she and her husband were “as red as crayfish” the next day.
Since their parole status was set to expire in July of this year, Shakhnoza said they applied for an extension in early February. As a backup, they filed for asylum in August, which allows applicants to remain in the U.S. while their cases are pending.
That’s why Shakhnoza said they weren’t worried about the intensifying ICE raids in the area.
“If we were scared, then maybe my husband would not have left the house,” Shakhnoza said. “I gave him a folder with all his documents and thought that if he showed these documents, he wouldn’t get detained.”
‘I was arrested by ICE’
On Oct. 18, Ilkhom was stopped by federal agents in a parking lot near O’Hare International Airport. He handed over the folder of documents his wife had prepared.
In a video captured by a camera inside his car, masked agents are heard ordering him to step outside and place his hands behind his head.
Shortly afterward, Shakhnoza received a text message from him saying, “I was arrested by ICE.”
“I panicked,” she said. “I was shaking. The kids cried, even though they’re all grown up now.”
She began writing down on a piece of paper every detail she could remember: How Ilkhom had left for work that warm October day in nothing but a t-shirt, how he later told her over the phone that it was freezing in the cell he was taken to. How he had asked for warm clothes, but the guards didn’t give him any.
The day after his arrest, Ilkhom was moved to a detention center in Minnesota. He was able to talk to his wife on the phone roughly three to four times a week while he was there. In the meantime, Shakhnoza rushed to find Ilkhom an attorney.
In late December, Ilkhom was moved again. He is now in a detention center in Texas, where he is awaiting a removal hearing scheduled for Jan. 5. Shakhnoza said it’s been harder for her to reach him there, and he’s only been able to call her once.
The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not respond to multiple inquiries into Ilkhom’s arrest.
Without her husband, Shakhnoza said she’s been on edge. She scans her surroundings whenever she leaves her home to go to work out of fear that federal immigration agents may be nearby.
“I’m not scared for myself,” she said. “I’m scared for the kids — that they’ll be left alone.”
Her eldest son, John (a pseudonym), sleeps on a mattress in the living room. Before the arrest, he was enjoying the life of a teenager and hoping to study medicine in college. Now, she said she sees him wake up in tears sometimes. There are days when he’s so overwhelmed he misses school.
John said it’s been hard to process his dad’s sudden disappearance. Though he distracts himself with video games, he said he worries about the upcoming trial date.
“I’m afraid we’ll lose our second chance at life,” John said, “Because there may be no future in Ukraine.”
The Trump administration is ‘within their rights’
While asylum applicants like Shakhnoza and her family are allowed to remain in the U.S. while their cases are pending, Linda Dakin-Grimm, a professor of law at the Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said the Trump administration is increasingly requiring them to wait in detention rather than in the community.
“The current approach is: Simply because you’ve asked for asylum doesn’t mean you can wander free,” she said. “You can wait for asylum in a detention center.”
Dakin-Grimm also said the government is legally allowed to detain people whose parole status has expired — even if such enforcement was rare under previous administrations.
“If your status expires, the system expects you to leave,” she said. “In the past, most of the time, nobody did anything about it. But now the Trump administration is acting very aggressively [to detain people]. It seems shocking, and it is inhumane, but they are often within their rights. That’s the scariest part that people are missing.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration is making it harder for Ukrainian immigrants to apply for parole extensions through the U4U program, said attorney Iva-Ugryn.
Ever since the processing pause was lifted, Iva-Ugryn said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been sending out ‘request for evidence’ notices to applicants, which ask individuals to prove how their circumstances warrant parole.
“It’s another delay, another burden, another difficulty for many people,” Iva-Ugryn said.
Shakhnoza said she received a ‘request for evidence’ notice on Dec. 15, roughly 10 months after she first filed for an extension for her family.
In October, the administration also implemented a $1,000 application fee for each parole applicant.
Congressman Quigley called the policy “unjust.”
“It’s placing a steep financial burden on families already under immense pressure,” Quigley said. “Many are unable to work because they haven’t got a work permit or they haven’t got their re-application approved. What the Trump administration is doing is essentially charging Ukrainians for their safety.”
With the Russian-Ukrainian peace talks dragging on, and even more immigration agents expected to return to the Chicago area in the spring, families like Ilkhom and Shakhnoza’s are stuck in limbo, wondering whether they will ever truly feel safe.
“There’s no lack of fear here,” Quigley said of the Ukrainian community in Chicago. “And they also know that ICE is going to come back, probably as an even stronger force, and everyone’s going to be vulnerable.”