One morning last month, Olena Dubchenko packed two suitcases for her and her four-year-old son, Maksim. Aside from clothes and toys, she included a few keepsakes: a swaddle, baby blanket and a worn-out fairytale book she brought from her war-torn hometown in Ukraine.
Dubchenko was preparing to move out of her Anchorage apartment and fly to Seattle with her son.
“I am grateful I was welcomed here. I am grateful I found a job. I am grateful for the empathetic people I met here,” she said. “But at a certain point, you start dealing with bureaucracy, and it never ends. It’s a constant battle.”
Dubchenko is from Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city close to the country's northeastern border, one of the first places devastated by war after Russia’s invasion in 2022. That year, Dubchenko came to Alaska with her husband and son.
But she decided to leave the state in March because she was not sure if and when her work authorization would be renewed. Dubchenko said she couldn’t live in Alaska without a job, so she was moving in with friends in Washington state so they would at least have a roof over their heads.
Many Ukrainians living in Alaska say that, beginning late last year, renewals of their authorization to stay and work in the U.S. stopped coming on time. Despite paying hefty fees and applying for documents six months in advance, several told KNBA that the process — which used to be relatively smooth and timely — was not working as expected anymore.
“You do everything right, but you face a wall, and you can’t help it,” Dubchenko said. “We became hostages of a situation we cannot control. Many Ukrainians have left for that reason.”
Delays and uncertainty
Zori Opanasevych directs the Anchorage-based Ukraine Relief Program, a group that helps Ukrainians with housing, employment and integration. Opanasevych said Dubchenko is one of at least a hundred Ukrainians who have left Alaska in recent months – some leaving the U.S. entirely.
She said some are exhausted from the constant stress of uncertainty, and others fear they won’t be able to provide for their children.
“It's families, it's individuals, people who have said, ‘I have given it my all,’” Opanasevych said.
She said more than a thousand Ukrainians have come to Alaska since the war started, primarily through two federal immigration programs, Uniting for Ukraine and Temporary Protected Status.
Last January, United for Ukraine stopped accepting new applicants after President Trump ordered the termination of all "categorical parole programs." It’s not clear if the Temporary Protected Status program will be renewed in October.
Ukrainians who are already in the U.S. through those programs can still apply to renew their status, which costs several thousand dollars per person. But Opanasevych, as well as several Ukrainians and their employers, told KNBA that the processing times for those applications have become both long and unpredictable — and that people are often losing their authorization to work because of it.
Opanasevych said this was causing even more confusion and uncertainty for Ukrainians who don’t have a safe place to return to and are trying to build a life in Alaska.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer a list of questions KNBA asked about the visa delays. Instead, in an emailed response, the DHS press team asked KNBA for the names of the people interviewed for the story — which KNBA did not provide.
In a second response, the DHS press team blamed the Biden administration for expanding humanitarian parole programs for Ukrainians.
“Biden’s mass parole program was revocable, offering no permanent or legal status to aliens while bucking the basis for humanitarian parole under U.S. law--meant for exceptional, individualized situations,” the press team wrote.
The officials also urged people to self-deport in exchange for a payment from the department.
“We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer,” DHS said. “If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
Efforts to keep Ukrainians in Alaska
Sen. Lisa Murkowski said many Ukrainians have reached out to her office as they’ve faced delays getting work authorizations.
“If they can't get their work authorization renewed, they can't work,” Murkowski said. “This causes a real problem, and not only for the individuals, but for those who were really counting on that workforce.”
Murkowski said Alaska’s congressional delegation has jointly signed on to letters urging the federal government to allow Ukrainian refugees to remain in the state.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy also wrote directly to President Trump, asking him to allow Ukrainians to stay and keep working on crucial infrastructure and resource development projects. Grant Robinson, a spokesperson for Dunleavy’s office, said the governor didn’t receive a response.
Robinson said the state has also reached out to the U.S. Department of Labor and DHS for guidance for Alaska employers that have Ukrainian workers waiting for document renewals.
Michael Smith is a co-owner of Alaska Minerals, which sets up camps in rural Alaska for resource development and science projects. The company has hired four Ukrainians and is sponsoring work visas for three of them.
“The ones that have worked with us – top shelf, they are amazing,” Smith said.
But the work authorizations for two of those workers lapsed this winter, which Smith said disrupted the company’s workflow.
Denis Khatman, the owner of a Delta Junction construction company, had the same complaint.
"You promise people to get a job done, and when you don't have enough workers, or your workers are laying out because of documents not ready, it does affect your business,” he said. “It's not like you go in and hire somebody else and train them again, you know?"
Opanasevych said that that the Ukraine Relief Program is pushing to create an exemption for Ukrainians in Alaska to receive green cards quickly, so they can help Alaska deliver on energy objectives set by Trump,
“We have a workforce shortage,” Opanasevych said. “We don't want these people to slip through and leave our state because of long bureaucratic backlogs.”
Watching the war from afar
In the meantime, Ukrainians in Alaska are keeping a nervous eye on the war back home.
Earlier this month, a drone attack on the city of Odessa destroyed an apartment complex and killed several people, including a child. The next day, in her Anchorage apartment, Oksana Bondar watched a video showing a crumbled house just around the corner from her own former home.
She said her friends living there had survived but lost everything.
“I didn’t sleep,” Bondar said in Russian. “I cried because I was imagining it could have been us.”
Bondar moved to Alaska at the end of 2023 and has been working as a teacher’s assistant in Klatt Elementary School in Anchorage. But she had to leave work for two-and-a-half months when the renewal of her legal status and work authorization did not arrive in December.
“Sitting in the U.S. without money is hard,” she said. “And I enjoy my work!”
Bondar returned to work when her documents came in February. But she said the uncertainty did not end. Her husband, the family’s main provider, is in the process of getting a work visa. But his Temporary Protected Status designation, which allows him to work in the meantime, runs out in October. It is unclear if that program will be renewed.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We are sitting and praying,” she said. “We live out of suitcases. I am 42, and I don’t have confidence in tomorrow.”
Bondar said moving to a new country again would be a challenge, and going to Ukraine is not an option.
“It’s one thing to restart a life once, and another – to go through changes constantly,” she said. “And there is nowhere to go back. They are bombing Odessa.”
Her neighbor and friend Oleg Hostynskyi has a different perspective.
Hostynskyi was planning to move from Odessa to Alaska with his wife and two children, but only he made it out before the Uniting for Ukraine program closed. His family is still in Ukraine.
“I have been here alone for two years already,” he said. “I can’t put it into words, it is really hard. Knowing that they are under fire there every day, and I am here.”
In Anchorage, Hostynskyi works as a mechanic at a road construction company. His employer is offering to sponsor a work visa for him, but it would mean that Hostynskyi wouldn’t be able to leave for several years during the application process.
If his family can’t come to Alaska, Hostynskyi plans to go back home when his status expires.
“I am not going to stay here longer because I will lose everyone back there,” he said. “My family is the dearest thing to me.”
For Dubchenko, who decided to go to Washington with her family, the future remains uncertain as well.
She left Alaska in March and said she regrets not seeing the Northern Lights at least once. If her documents don’t get renewed in the next few months, Dubchenko said her family will have to pack their suitcases again and leave the country.
