SAN DIEGO — Kateryna, a 22-year-old Ukrainian woman, experienced firsthand how quickly the U.S. government can change the way it processes people who are fleeing for their lives when there is the political will to do so.
She was in Mexico performing with Nikolas Constantine, her boyfriend and ballroom dance partner, when Russia invaded her country. The couple realized that Kateryna could not return to Ukraine. Constantine is a U.S. citizen, so they decided to head for his home in the Los Angeles area.
But when the pair, along with Constantine's mother, tried to cross north in a car from Tijuana on March 3 at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry to present Kateryna to U.S. officers and request protection for her, Customs and Border Protection took Kateryna into custody and threatened to charge Constantine and his mother with smuggling. Eventually, Kateryna was sent to an immigration detention facility across the country in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"You don't know what's going to happen next," Kateryna recalled of the experience. "It's just horrible."
She asked not have her full name published because her family is still in Ukraine.
How Kateryna and other Ukrainians who arrived in the first days and weeks of the escalating war were treated stands in stark contrast with how Ukrainians are being received now.
What happened to the earlier arrivals illustrates how the system usually functions if someone is able to reach U.S. soil and request asylum without being expelled. Once federal officials decided to treat Ukrainians differently from other migrants fleeing potentially deadly situations in their home countries, the entry process for them became quick, with no time in custody before being released into the United States to reunite with loved ones here.
Neither CBP nor ICE responded to requests for comment about what happened to Kateryna.
Weeks detained
After she was taken into custody at the border, CBP put Kateryna in a little room at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry and questioned her, she recalled.
Meanwhile, Constantine said, he and his mother were held in what he referred to as a cage for what felt like hours. He isn't sure exactly how much time passed, he said, because their phones were taken from them while CBP searched his mother's car.
"All these women cops were coming up to us and saying we just committed a felony, we're going to prison — 'This is going to be a permanent record. You guys are in so much trouble. We're towing your car away,'" Constantine recalled. "Finally out of nowhere, like three hours later, two cops came over and gave us our passports and said we're free to go."
"It's like they can make their own rules," Constantine added. "When you don't have a phone and aren't able to speak to your lawyer, they have full range of power over you."
CBP placed Kateryna in five-point shackles — connecting her wrists, ankles and waist — and sent her to the San Ysidro Port of Entry, she said. There, CBP kept her in a holding cell in the basement for weeks and only permitted her to call Constantine after more than a week in custody. She said she was never allowed to contact her attorney.
Along with roughly 24 other people — mostly Ukrainian and Russian — she had to sleep on the floor of the cell, Kateryna recalled. She was given a thin, metallic blanket that was not enough to keep her warm in the cell's notoriously cold temperatures. Spanish-speaking asylum-seekers have long called those cells the hielera, or ice box.
"It was so cold there that after the second day, people started getting sick," Kateryna said through a friend, translating from Russian. "Everybody was asking them to at least turn off the air conditioner, and their response was, 'We cannot turn it off because we keep it cold to kill the bacteria in the air.'"
The food portions were small, she said. She recalled one Ukrainian woman in her 60s had a heart condition but wasn't given her medication while in custody.
Constantine and his mother frantically tried to find out where Kateryna was and what would happen to her. His mother reached out to her congresswoman, Julia Brownley, D-Calif., and to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A reporter began sending inquiries to CBP about the case.
"I've never seen him so distraught in his life," said longtime friend Matteo Laudati of Constantine.
After two weeks in the port of entry holding cell, Kateryna was transferred — handcuffed on a several-hour flight — to a long-term detention facility in Louisiana in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She met dozens of other Ukrainian and Russian women there.
She tried to mentally prepare herself for staying in the facility for months, but once at South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, she was released the next day. Constantine and his mother say it was because of Brownley's efforts that she wasn't held longer.
Brownley's office confirmed that the congresswoman had quickly reached out to the White House about the case.
"As a democracy under siege, Ukraine and the Ukrainian people deserve our utmost support and aid — that includes helping Ukrainians fleeing their war-torn country settle in the United States," Brownley said in a statement.
No officer assigned
Loved ones of other early arrivals described a torturous process while they waited to hear from Ukrainians who had been taken into custody.
Maksym Armash, 22, spent a week waiting to find out what happened to his fiancé when she crossed the border to San Diego.
Armash, who lives in Virginia, is originally from Ukraine but has been a green-card holder for years. He and his fiancé had an appointment scheduled for April with the U.S. embassy in Ukraine to get her a visa to join him in the United States, but that was cancelled after Russia invaded.
As the couple tried to figure out how to keep her safe, she suggested trying to get to Armash and the United States through Mexico and requesting asylum.
On her fourth try, the fiancé and two other Ukrainian asylum-seekers managed to drive in the San Ysidro car lanes onto U.S. soil, where they were taken into CBP custody.
A week later, the fiancé ended up at South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. Armash was still in San Diego, waiting for her to come out the north side of the port of entry.
In the meantime, his sister and her family had come to Tijuana, walked up to U.S. officials and been processed into the United States in an hour, he said.
"I was so confused — like, seriously, what's wrong? What's different with my fiancé?" Armash recalled.
After a public outcry over a Ukrainian family being turned away from the border under Title 42 — a policy enacted during the pandemic that allows officials to keep asylum-seekers and other undocumented migrants off U.S. soil and expel them if they cross anyway without screening them for protection needs — U.S. policy shifted seemingly overnight.
Ukrainians are now fast-tracked through the port of entry, and they are released on the north side of the building through humanitarian parole, which gives them one-year permits to remain in the United States. Those permits are similar to the ones given to Afghan evacuees when the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
With two attorneys helping him, Armash was still unable to get in touch with his fiancé for days. Attorney Kristina Ghazaryan said she called and repeatedly left messages for ICE officials at the detention facility. ICE never called her back, she said.
"I was really unhappy with the situation because for eight days there was no officer assigned," Ghazaryan recalled.
Finally, she reached a supervisor with ICE and was able to get the case moving. Several of the women, including Armash's fiancé, were released days later with humanitarian parole.
Harder to get out
Russians fleeing their country because they disagree with the war and fear the repercussions they face as political dissidents under Putin have had a much more difficult time entering the United States than Ukrainians.
Those who have managed to get onto U.S. soil have faced similar in custody experiences as the Ukrainians who crossed early on in the invasion. But for the Russians, getting out of detention is much more complicated.
They are generally held in ICE custody until they pass screening interviews that are the first step in the asylum process. Then, they get documents telling them to appear in immigration court for further proceedings on their asylum cases. The Ukrainians do not have immigration court cases.
Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney with Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said she'd had several issues trying to reach a Russian husband and wife after they went into the port of entry.
Cargioli declined to explain how the couple managed to get into the port of entry to get processed for asylum. They entered on the same day that a group that had been camped by the pedestrian entrance to San Ysidro Port of Entry was quietly processed by officials.
The attorney called the port of entry to speak with her clients and was told to call back that evening. When she called back, she was able to speak with the wife for a few minutes to go over what to expect and what information she had sent to CBP in an email. In the middle of their conversation, a CBP officer told her that she couldn't discuss her client's upcoming screening interview with the woman and hung up.
Cargioli called back several times with no answer. She finally reached a supervisor who accused her of coaching her client.
"He said, 'You're her attorney in court. If we had everyone here speak to an attorney we'd never get our work done,'" said Cargioli, who took notes on the conversation.
Despite Cargioli's insistence that her client had a right to speak with her, the supervisor told her she would have to wait until the client moved to ICE detention.
The wife was sent to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego while the husband ended up in a facility in Mississippi. Asylum-seeking adult family members have often ended up separated in different detention centers, which can complicate their asylum cases because they lose the ability to call each other as witnesses.
Even after they were in ICE custody, confusion among staff at the detention center about her client's right to a free legal call delayed Cargioli's ability to communicate with the wife by a day, the lawyer said.
Cargioli said she has experienced these kinds of challenges since she started working with clients at the border a few years ago.
Unclear future
Before the pandemic completely shuttered asylum processing at ports of entry, most asylum-seekers who arrived without children were required to stay in ICE detention facilities for months and often for the duration of their cases.
But for Ukrainians who have come to the U.S.-Mexico border in the past couple of weeks, the experience has changed dramatically.
They do not spend time in custody. Rather, buses drive them from a sports complex owned by the city of Tijuana that has turned into a shelter to a special entrance at the San Ysidro Port of Entry that remains closed to other pedestrians. Within a matter of hours, they walk out the other side to volunteers waiting with hot meals and offers of options for temporary housing and travel to their final destinations around the United States.
According to a volunteer at a booth checking in new arrivals to the sports complex shelter, CBP has been processing between 300 and 600 Ukrainians per day.
Ghazaryan said she is no longer receiving frantic phone calls from people asking for help getting their Ukrainian loved ones out of custody. But Russians who manage to cross the border are still likely to end up in detention, at least temporarily, if they do not have children.
And for nationalities including Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Haitians who have generally not been able to request asylum in years because of Title 42, it is not yet clear which version of asylum processing will receive them once that policy ends on May 23.
For Kateryna and her loved ones, her small taste of the treatment that asylum-seekers have long received at the U.S.-Mexico border was enough to convince them that it was not something that anyone fleeing for their life should have to experience.
"It's almost like an endurance test to see if you're strong enough — it's honestly disgusting," Laudati said in a group call. "(Officials) treat them like they've committed a murder."
"They break you down," Constantine agreed.
"It feels really scary," Kateryna added.
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