The U.S. government recently started accepting applications from individuals and organizations seeking to help Ukrainians fleeing the war in Ukraine come to the U.S., CBS News reported.

The Biden Administration has set up an online portal for the program, called Uniting For Ukraine.

“Uniting for Ukraine builds on the robust humanitarian assistance the U.S. government is providing as we complement the generosity of countries throughout Europe that are hosting millions of Ukrainian citizens and others who have been displaced,” the Department of Homeland Security notes on its website.

Additional details on the program and the portal are available here.

Dozens of Ukrainian children have been separated from relatives, friends or older siblings with whom they have traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border under a law designed to prevent migrant children from being trafficked, reports Miriam Jordan in the New York Times.

“The brunt of the law has been felt by Central American children, the largest group of minors to reach the border in recent years and who are often fleeing gang violence,” writes Jordan. But those children “typically are aware of the policy and know that they will be taken into temporary custody. For Ukrainian children, the separation from their caretakers has been an unexpected, shocking twist in their escape from a war zone.”

Jordan reports that the separations are different from those in 2018, “when the Trump administration intentionally removed children from migrant parents to discourage border crossings; the punitive measure also resulted in children being sent to government shelters.” (click here for full story).

A recent episode of NPR’s “State of Ukraine” podcast also examined the separation of Ukrainian children at the border from family members who are not their parents (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510366/state-of-ukraine).

I completely agree with what the leader of the Anglican church recently said in his response to the British government’s plan to place some asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said that “sub-contracting out our responsibilities” to refugees can’t stand up to God’s scrutiny, noted Jill Lawless in a article for the Association Press.

Speaking at a recent joint news conference in the Rwandan capital Kigali, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel said that people relocated to Rwanda “will be given the support including up to five years of training, integration, accommodation, health care, so that they can resettle and thrive,” according to a CNN report.

Delivering a sermon on Easter Sunday at Canterbury Cathedral, Welby said “The details are for politics and politicians. The principle must stand the judgment of God and it cannot.”

Millions of displaced families across eastern Africa will fa”ll deeper into hunger as food rations dwindle due to humanitarian resources being stretched to the limit as the world grapples with a toxic cocktail of conflict, climate shocks, and COVID-19, combined with spiraling costs of food and fuel,” UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned on April 13.

Despite efforts to make resources stretch through prioritization strategies, meaning food assistance is prioritized for the most vulnerable families, “the sheer number of refugees in need of support has grown, along with the gap between resourcing and needs. In the past decade the number of refugees in eastern Africa has nearly tripled, going from 1.82 million in 2012 to almost 5 million today including 300,000 new refugees last year alone,” the agencies said in a joint news release.

The Biden administration “is preparing to roll out a program intended for Ukrainian refugees that would expedite the process for those trying to come to the United States, according to two administration officials,” CNN reported on April 12.

The new program “is expected to help people interested in coming to the US and allow them to stay in the country temporarily. According to one administration official, individuals would need to have a sponsorship application filled out on their behalf by someone in the US in order to come to the country. Details of the plan are still being finalized,” wrote Kevin Liptak and Priscilla Alvarez in a story posted on CNN’s website.

In a recent letter to President Biden, a bipartisan group of 65 House members urged the president to take a number of actions to help Ukrainians seeking refuge in the U.S. in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We appreciate the decision on March 3, 2022 to announce Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Ukrainian nationals physically present in the United States as of March 1, 2022, so that no Ukrainian needs to return immediately to a country under siege while Russia advances a military campaign that indiscriminately attacks civilians and military targets alike,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

“As the conflict continues, we urge you to modify the physical presence eligibility date for TPS from March 1st to the publication date of the forthcoming Federal Register notice, thereby making any Ukrainian in the United States on that date eligible for Temporary Protected Status,” they said. “This technical update could provide significant relief for Ukrainians who recently entered, as they cannot—and should not—return to a war zone right now. It will also allow these Ukrainians to work and attend school, contribute economically to the United States and support themselves, while they await the end of this war.”

The House members said that they also welcome the Administration’s announcement that the United States will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing harm through “the full range of legal pathways,” including the refugee admissions and regular immigration processes, as well as through humanitarian parole.

“In concert with this announcement, we also recommend you utilize existing administrative options to improve efficient processing for Ukrainians outside of the United States who already qualify for immigration benefits.” the lawmakers told Biden.

“We encourage the Administration to further provide additional resources to U.S. embassy personnel across Europe who are processing immigrant visa applications for eligible Ukrainians, including immediate family members of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.”

The lawmakers said that they have been alerted to the need for more coordination between the National Visa Center and Department of State (specifically U.S. Embassies). 

Click here for the April 6 letter.

Oliwia Dabrowska, the the little girl in the red coat walking through the Krakow Ghetto in Schindler’s List is helping refugees fleeing Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

“Almost 30 years after the film was released, and decades since the horrors of the Holocaust, Oliwia is now echoing the actions of the film’s hero, Oskar Schindler, as she helps people escape from the devastation in Ukraine,” writes Rachel O’Connor in the UK’s Metro.

In March, she “shared an artist’s rendering of her iconic scene in the film with her coat color changed from red to blue to represent Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag, which she also shared as part of the post” on Instagram, reports Deadline’s Tom Tapp.

“She was always the symbol of hope,” wrote Dabrowska. “Let her be it again.”

Two Harvard University freshmen have launched a website “designed to connect people fleeing Ukraine to those in safer countries willing to take them in — and it’s generating offers of help and housing worldwide,” reports Rodrique Ngowi in the Denver Post.

Marco Burstein and Avi Schiffmann used their coding skills to create UkraineTakeShelter.com.

More than 18,000 prospective hosts “have signed up on the site to offer assistance to refugees seeking matches with hosts in their preferred or convenient locations,” Ngowi reports in the article.

Make no mistake about it. The flood of refugees from Ukraine as a result of Russia’s invasion is part of a broader plan by Vladimir Putin to split the Western Alliance.

“Refugees are not a design flaw of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine,” the New York Times states in a April 1, 2022 editorial, “Putin Knows What He’s Doing With Ukraine’s Refugees. This Is the World’s Big Test.”

“Indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian infrastructure is part of a broader strategy to demoralize the civilian population and drive residents into neighboring countries, where their presence can be destabilizing,” the editorial goes on to say, noting that in 2021, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the ruler of Belarus, “apparently manufactured a crisis by encouraging migrants to cross into Poland.”

All of this highlights the need to support countries that are hosting refugees, thus making this tactic of trying to weaponize refugees less effective, the editorial notes.

Putin “has weaponized refugees (particularly women, children, the elderly and infirm) as a potent way to destabilize neighboring nations — in this case, Poland, Romania, Moldova and, eventually, other Western European countries,” wrote Mark C. Poznansky, Michael V. Callahan and Jacki A Hart in a recent opinion piece in the Hill newspaper.

And this is not the first time Putin has been accused of weaponizing refugees.

U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander in Europe for the 28-member military alliance NATO in 2016 told a Senate hearing that Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad were weaponizing the region’s refugee crisis and using it to undermine Europe’s security and unity.

In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, Alexander Betts argues that now is the time for Europe to reset how it treats refugees in the wake of the exodus of Ukrainians fleeing their country after Russia’s invasion.

“The discrepancy in the treatment of refugee populations is contrary to the spirit of international refugee law, which upholds the right of refugees to seek asylum anywhere in the world without discrimination,” writes Betts.

Forced displacement “will be a defining challenge of the twenty-first century everywhere. That reality has profound implications for how Europe aids refugees,” writes Betts, who is a s Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs at the University of Oxford and author of The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies.

“The continent can no longer act just as a distant donor of humanitarian and development aid; now, it must develop the capacity to welcome large numbers of refugees, no matter where they are from.”

Click here for his column.