Larisa
and George Gabliya
Yuri Karpenko expected his wife’s parents to arrive in Seattle from eastern Ukraine in two weeks’ time.
Instead,
on Monday, he got a phone call telling him that George and Larisa
Gabliya, granted refugee status by the US in November 2016, would not be
coming. They, like an estimated 20,000 others, had been blocked from
entering the country by President Donald Trump’s executive order halting
the refugee program for 120 days.
“It’s awful, especially because
they are older parents, they are not young anymore,” Karpenko told
BuzzFeed News. “They want some kind of security in their life, and right
now they don’t have any security, or even a place to live.”
Karpenko
said his father and mother-in-law were granted admission into the US as
refugees in November 2016, fleeing religious persecution and the
conflict in Ukraine.
They began to prepare, and as required by
Ukrainian law, they gave up their Ukrainian identification — and were
left with their passport — resigned from their jobs, and sold their
apartment before their anticipated departure (their passport only allows
for international travel, which they do not have the ability to do, for
visa and financial reasons). They are now stuck in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
They’re jobless, without a place to live, and without the ability to
travel outside of the country. They will be without these safeguards for
at least the next four months until — and if — the ban is lifted.
Click here for the full article.
Source: Buzzfeed
