For Yaryna Levchuk, working is etched into who she is.
When war broke out in her native Ukraine four and a half years ago, the longtime pharmacist volunteered to sort medical aid alongside her regular shift. When she and her family were ultimately forced to flee their home for the United States, a move that landed them in the Chicago area, Levchuk started working as soon as she was allowed.
And since her arrival, she says she’s tried — with painstaking care — to never miss an immigration deadline. She’s wanted to protect her ability to work, something that’s not just vital to supporting her family but an expectation of herself that she pursues with pride.
Lately, though, changing policies and delayed processing have hamstrung her ability to work. Soon, her husband could face the same issue, leaving the family to grapple with an undeniable uncertainty: Can they stay?
“We do not demand. We’re just friendly asking, if it’s possible, please help us,” Levchuk told the Tribune on a recent morning. “Just give us permission to work and we will work.”
For weeks, the future of temporary protected status for more than 100,000 Ukrainians who have sought refuge in the U.S. following Russia’s invasion has hung in the balance. The humanitarian protections were slated to expire Monday. As the deadline loomed, and as war wages on back home, Ukrainians refugees across the country have been wrestling with what will happen after any cutoff comes and goes — if they’ll be able to continue working and studying, how they’ll support their families. If they’ll be at risk of detention and deportation. If they have to leave.
The Trump administration reportedly announced on Sunday that TPS for Ukrainians would be kept for now, staying a final decision for a later date. No official announcement was made.
But the 11th-hour development — which, according to news reports, stated that a decision over the designation would be announced at the “appropriate time” — still leaves Ukrainians in a state of limbo. And with silence from federal officials until the deadline, questions have swirled over the long-term fate of the status, sowing uncertainty and fear, immigration experts and local advocates say.
Meanwhile, for Ukrainians that may have other options, attempts to secure protection through other pathways have been hindered by slowed processing times.
And there are also broader political dynamics to consider. Russia in recent weeks has ramped up attacks in Ukraine, while relations between Ukraine and the U.S. are increasingly deteriorating. There are concerns about a scale back in U.S. assistance to Ukraine and what that would entail for Ukrainian support more broadly, including how that trickles down to other issues such as TPS, according to a senate aide familiar with the matter.
Ahead of the deadline, Levchuk lost her work authorization and, in turn, her job as a pharmacy technician last month. She says she doesn’t know what will happen to her husband’s job.More Top Picks Best Medicine Cabinets
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
Levchuk, 41, spent her whole life in Ukraine. Her parents are Ukrainian, her grandparents, too.
This time five years ago, Levchuk was living on the west side of the country, closer to the Polish border, with her husband and their two kids. She was a manager at a pharmacy.
Before war broke out, Levchuk remembers her sister, who lives in the U.S., calling and telling her that news reports were saying there was going to be a war in Ukraine. She didn’t want to believe it. Still, she and her husband thought through how they could protect their kids if conflict broke out. They decided to get permission for Levchuk’s mother to take their children abroad, just in case they needed to flee.
Then Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
Levchuck’s husband tried to get her to leave with their kids, but Levchuk wanted to stay.
“I’m a pharmacist,” she recalled thinking to herself. “Probably, they will need me.”
So with their suitcases in hand, Levchuck’s kids, who were around 11 and 15 at the time, crossed the border to Poland with her mother in tow. They walked for two days.
Levchuk hoped that war wouldn’t go on for more than a few weeks, maybe a month or two. Her husband joined Ukraine’s territorial army while Levchuk continued to work.
She also began volunteering for the war effort, gathering and sorting foreign medical aid for the frontlines and across the region. The war dragged on, and the distance from her children grew unbearable.
“My husband told me, ‘You have to go to them. You have to go to them because they can’t sleep without you,’” Levchuk remembered, her voice catching. “It was hard. It (wasn’t) my decision.”
With her husband still in Ukraine, she left for Poland. But that’s as far as she wanted to go. She worried that if she fled any further, she couldn’t come back.
Staying, though, became difficult. Her husband started to undergo health issues, rendering him unable to help defend their country. And her sister, back in the U.S., became adamant that they needed to move to her. Eventually, at her family’s urging, Levchuk relented.
They entered through a program called Uniting for Ukraine (U4U).
Launched by former President Joe Biden in 2022, U4U is a “humanitarian parole” program. It allowed Ukrainian immigrants to temporarily stay and work in America, two years at a time, so long as they found an American sponsor willing to support them.
Levchuk and her family arrived in late September 2022. They settled in northwest suburban Buffalo Grove.
Right away, Levchuk’s focus was set on finding work. She spoke only a few words of English and didn’t have a car, but she landed an interview at a pharmacy a few suburbs away. They offered her a job as a pharmacy technician — and her husband, too.
He didn’t have pharmacy experience but he could drive. He helped with deliveries.
In time, they acclimated. Levchuk began working towards earning her credentials to practice as a pharmacist in the U.S.
“Work for me, it’s not just about money,” she said. “It’s what I do to be happy and to make other people happy.”
In 2024, their first U4U parole period expired. She re-applied for another two-year parole as soon as she could, conscious to keep up with requirements so there wasn’t any chance she would have a lapse in protection. Accordingly, she also applied for temporary protected status.
U4U and TPS go hand in hand, according to Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. With U4U, Hallett said, the idea was to allow people to come here on parole; later, they would hopefully transition to another status once their parole period ended. One of those statuses was TPS.
Established by Congress in 1990, TPS allows people already in the U.S. to stay and work legally if their homelands are deemed unsafe. Issued at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the status can be granted to people from designated nationalities for periods of six to 18 months.
Ukrainians first got TPS immediately after Russia’s invasion. The Biden administration then expanded and extended the reprieve in August 2023. It’s under that broadened eligibility that Levchuk and her husband applied for TPS.
Applying, in and of itself, has been complicated for the couple. Levchuk has had to apply twice and her current appeal has been pending since February 2025. What’s more convoluted is that TPS-granted work eligibility is decided on a case-by-case basis. When people are applying for TPS for the first time, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can deem applicants what’s called “prima facie eligible,” which designates them eligible to work before a final decision is made on their TPS application, USCIS denotes on its website.
But when people are re-registering, work eligibility is decided only when their entire TPS package is adjudicated, per USCIS. Because Levchuk is on her second application, she falls into that latter category, meaning she cannot secure a TPS-allotted work permit until she is granted final approval, she said.
Instead, she’s had to rely on work authorization through her humanitarian parole. But that’s also been a tenuous safeguard to rely on.
Last year, on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to “terminate all categorical parole programs” that were contrary to his policies. Three days later, a freeze order went out from USCIS’ acting director, which put a halt on all U4U applications, including those trying to renew their parole status.
Processing U4U renewals has since resumed — at the requirement of a court order issued in late May 2025 — but experts and advocates say the program faces significant delays.
“Everything has been taking a long time with this administration,” Chicago-based immigration lawyer Julia Sverdloff said.
As for Levchuk’s husband, she said he is also awaiting a final decision over his TPS application, but he’s at least been deemed eligible to work in the interim, giving the family one other avenue to keep an income. That is, as long as TPS is an option.
On paper, there should be a grace period of sorts. According to federal statute, if the homeland secretary doesn’t extend or cancel a country’s TPS designation at least 60 days before it expires, then the status is automatically extended for six months. That would mean that Ukrainians TPS holders should have their status extended until April 2027, said Hallett, the University of Chicago professor.“Well, I would say,” she added, “that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
How TPS designations are handled has been such a moving target in recent months that it’s hard to know what to expect this time around. In Trump’s second term, Homeland Security has ended TPS for more than 1 million people from more than a dozen countries; and over the summer, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that undercuts the ability of courts to question the process that immigration authorities use to revoke TPS.
“So it’s not even clear that a court could do anything if the administration decided to violate the statute,” Hallett said.
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For Ukraine, the most recent and similar case to compare to would be El Salvador, which saw its TPS expire last month, also without much word from the government. As of Friday, the latest status update on the USCIS website says an announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the “appropriate time” and until then, “Salvadorian individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection including work authorization.”But the situations are not one-to-one. The current administration has treated Ukrainians differently than other populations, said one senate aide familiar with the matter. The aide pointed to the administration continuing to quietly re-parole U4U applicants. So people could be okay, the aide said, but there’s just a lot of uncertainty right now.
In response to questions, USCIS said any potential actions related to the future of TPS for Ukrainians will be announced at the “appropriate time” in a Federal Register notice.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return a request for comment Sunday night.It’s the lack of clarity that’s hard to contend with, Hallett said. Even with a vague allowance for more time, or if a statutory technicality kicks in, how that ambiguity plays out in real-time is another question, especially when it comes to employment.
“Employers are trying to comply with the law,” Hallett said. “If they’re unsure whether someone is authorized to work in the United States, I think a lot of employers would rather let that person go and hire someone with more secure status because they don’t want to get into the crosshairs of the Trump administration.”
Last month, a group of U.S. senators — including Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth — sent a letter urging the administration to issue an 18-month extension of TPS for Ukraine. There’s a chance advocacy could have an impact, the senate aides who spoke with the Tribune said. As far as legislative action goes, there isn’t a near-term opportunity for resolution, as Congress isn’t currently in session, the aides said. But this illuminates a broader, ongoing conversation, the aides added, over the path to permanent residency for people with protected status.
RefugeeOne, a West Ridge-based resettlement nonprofit, has been receiving calls since September from clients asking what to do as Monday’s deadline approached, according to communications director Sally Schulze.
Changes to TPS for Ukrainians stand to affect about 1,500 families in RefugeeOne’s programming. Per Schulze, RefugeeOne has clients whose work permits have already expired leading up to Monday’s deadline, and others who anticipated their authorization would be up starting Tuesday.“There’s so many questions right now, and I wish we had answers to them,” Schulze said. “(But) it seems like nobody does.”
She said clients are frustrated. And just confused.
“(They’re) trying to figure out how did we get to this point,” Schulze said. “They were welcomed here because their country was at war … and many of them do not have a place to go back to.”
Levchuk’s parole, through U4U, expired on September 27. With it, she lost her work authorization. She sent a letter asking USCIS to expedite her TPS application that has been pending for the past 18 months. On Oct. 1, USCIS sent an email back to Levchuk informing her that it needed more time to respond to her inquiry because a higher volume of inquiries was delaying processing. Levchuk, in a call late Sunday, said she was unaware of the Trump administration’s last minute announcement but hoped that it meant good news for her and her family. She said her statuses still hadn’t changed. She still worries, she said, about her and her husband’s ability to work.Her son, who is now a senior in high school, has asked if they can stay so he can graduate. He also hopes to go to college. But Levchuk doesn’t know how they’d be able to apply for financial aid with their status in question or how they’ll afford school without steady work.
She and her husband often talk about what to do. They feel caught.
“It’s heartbreaking. I have such … pain about my country because they did not deserve it,” she faltered. “So over there it’s not okay. Over here, also, we do not have certainties.”
Levchuk said she does not want to cast blame. She remains grateful for the past few years.
“No matter what’s happened, I just want to say thank you,” she said, “at least for this time you gave us.”
The Associated Press contributed.