At a grocery store on the main street of Orange City, a customer mulled over jars of jam through the hum of a refrigerator filled with meats and cheeses.
“I haven’t tried the strawberry, or the raspberry, but I love the black currant,” said Lynn Vander Broek, an Orange City resident.
This isn’t a typical market. On the shelves of Schedryck, there’s dried squid, pickled squash and sunflower oils — all products of Ukraine. The store also stocks food from other European countries.
Nataliia Valianska, a former banker, opened the business last year to fill a need for refugees like herself.
“I grew up near the Black Sea, so, we love sea products,” Valianska said.
She left the port of Odesa when Russia invaded Ukraine more than three years ago.
“My husband said, ‘It’s war, we need to go.’ And we went to the western part of Ukraine,” she added.
Valianska fled to Poland, Romania, Spain and back to western Ukraine, where she heard about Martha Hulshof, who lives in northwest Iowa. Hulshof helped bring almost 150 Ukrainians to Sioux County through a sister who serves as a missionary in western Ukraine.
Hulshof now worries Valianska and other Ukrainians will have to leave.
"They're working one, two, three jobs. They're in school. One Ukrainian is expecting a baby in June. They're starting their lives here," Hulshof said. "They learned English and they're just settling in. Why would you be doing this? I don't understand it.”
President Donald Trump said he would decide soon whether to revoke temporary legal status for 240,000 Ukrainians, as his administration did with refugees from Venezuela and Haiti.
It’s hard to tell how many Ukrainians ended up in Iowa because some immigrants came through private sponsorship. They initially sought humanitarian parole through the Uniting for Ukraine program.
The Bureau of Refugee Services, a federally funded office of the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, served 159 Ukrainians statewide. However, a spokesperson stated the number isn’t accurate because some parolees arrived in the county outside the normal resettlement process. The U.S. Department of State said some also arrived on visas.
“The way Trump is doing this, he could deport any of them and all of them, no matter what — in April already. Is that going to happen?” Hulshof said. “These Ukrainians are so fearful. Why would they send them back? We did everything legally."
Legal expert weighs in on the issue
Immigration lawyer Suzie Pritchett works with the Refugee Clinic at Drake University in Des Moines. She says the legal status for some Ukrainians is in limbo.
“The situation is very fluid, and my heart goes out to them as they navigate this unknown future,” Pritchett said. “Of course, with many presidential actions around the area of immigration, it often then gets litigated in the federal courts, so that takes a while, and federal courts may issue an injunction.”
A majority of the Ukrainians in Iowa have temporary protective status or TPS, which Pritchett says allows them to potentially stay through October 2026. But even TPS doesn’t last forever, and Ukrainians can lose it at any time.
“Pretty hard for a lot of people, particularly because they have been here for a couple of years. They’ve started businesses. They’ve had children, and if they were born in the U.S., they are U.S. citizens. They’ve bought homes,” Pritchett said. “I’ve worked with a group of students who are now going to our universities in Iowa. They were foreign exchange students when the war broke out and haven't seen their families in years.”
The push to keep Ukrainian refugees in America
Hulshof saw firsthand the hardships faced by Ukrainians when she visited her sister there earlier this month. That’s where she watched the White House meeting between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Before all Ukrainians are like, ‘Yes, Trump! Yes, Trump!’ because I think they’re going to end the war. Now, they’re so furious with Trump,” Hulshof said.
Hulshof wants others to reach out to federal lawmakers to urge them to help keep the Ukrainians in the country.
"It doesn't matter how you vote. These are human beings," Hulshoff added. "These are people that have nothing to go back to."
Iowa's Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra also lives in Sioux County. He released the following statement:
“I applaud President Trump for working towards peace in Ukraine and advancing American values on the global stage. Reports that legal status for Ukrainians in the United States could be revoked remain unconfirmed. I commend the brave people of Ukraine for fighting for liberty, freedom and sovereignty.”
Hope for a new, permanent home
Valianska, who once lived in a big Ukrainian city, says she can’t put a price on safety and security. She loves calling the much smaller Orange City home.
“It’s really a good place because it’s friendly here,” Valianska said. “They help us a lot.”
Her husband, a retired Ukrainian soldier, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma months after arriving in America. She credited better medical care here for his remission.
“Usually, people in Ukraine try and travel to Germany or Israel for treatment because they have good medicine there,” she said.
They pray Trump allows them to stay.
“We’re afraid. We’re tired. The war didn’t start in 2022, it started in 2014 in Crimea and Donbas," Valianska said. "But if we need to go, we’ll go,” she said.
