President Biden, your administration needs your help to aid Ukrainians

Mr. President, we need your help. Or, more accurately, your administration needs your help — specifically, to get on with helping the refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. The gears of the bureaucracy are grinding slowly, far too slowly to keep pace with the mission.

Since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the UN migration agency reports nearly 3.5 million refugees have already fled the country, with at least another 6.5 million displaced within it — and more still who would flee if they could but were trapped in situ. Others were known to have fled the country without being documented. We were already there: at the 10 million mark in under a month’s time.

Russian attacks in Ukraine are only continuing to escalate.

The numbers of these sudden refugees are only going to get worse.

And yet, Mr. President, the wheels of your government’s humanitarian response have sand stuck in the works. We’ve seen truly impressive, lightning-speed action on the administration’s part in getting needed funding and equipment to the Ukrainians fighting on the ground. Transfers of this type and speed demand a singularity of focus, and a suspension of standard operating procedures in order to meet the mission demands. This agility, though, hasn’t had a parallel in how we support the war’s victims — the women and children, the elderly, the most vulnerable.

I recently outlined six steps we need to take on an urgent basis — starting with the basic recognition that we are going to have to help put our shoulder to the task; our European partners can’t do this alone, even if we do help with emergency funding for humanitarian relief. Poland alone has already welcomed more than 2 million refugees. The Polish people are overwhelmed, but refugees keep coming at an unbelievable pace — now with a new child refugee crossing the border every second. But here in the U.S., we don’t even yet have a way decided on whether, much less how to bring in meaningful numbers of refugees.

The State Department could declare a special category for Ukrainian War Refugees (much as we did in the 90s for refugees from the war in Kosovo). Or we could at least provide special visas for family reunification, for those refugees who already have close family relations here in the sizable Ukrainian diaspora in the US. Alternatively, we could bring these refugees from Putin’s violence in under humanitarian parole much as was done for the Afghan evacuees just months ago — something akin to the emergency approach Canada has announced — even though this is far from a perfect solution.

There are multiple ways to proceed — but we need to get going. At this point, even those refugees with parent-child relationships with U.S. citizens here in the United States don’t have an avenue even to apply for a timely visa. (Really? Wartime refugees may wait months before there’s an appointment time slot available for the required interview with a U.S. consular officer in Europe to advance their application for a tourist visa.) The standard refugee processing system would leave these refugees in limbo for years before becoming eligible for relocation. We need to change this, and quickly — and it may take direction from the Oval Office to cut through government bureaucracy to make something happen on a sufficiently timely basis. It’s beyond time.

Mr. President, you’ve provided clear and decisive commander’s intent by stating bluntly that the U.S. “will welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms.” We need your help to make it so, and the bureaucratic processes to move at speed.

More than one-quarter of Ukraine’s population has already been forced from their homes, and it’s been less than a month since Putin launched this war. We need the president’s help — and action — now.

Diane E. Batchik serves on the national board of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of the nation’s largest refugee resettlement agencies. These views expressed are her own.