Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”
Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.
He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.
“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”
You can lay all that at the feet of the boomer generation and their parents, thank you. American exceptionalism was propagandized in our textbooks, by our media, and worst of all by the voting bloc that now demands we shut up and work harder to get to where they got to. Many of us in gen-x and older millennial’s were just as horrified at the atrocities of our earlier generations as many who faced down the receiving end of that exceptionalism outside the US. However, it wasn’t until the last 20-25 years that we even knew all the awful shit that happened at the hands of American imperialism.
We didn’t learn the same history in school. We didn’t have the ability to push back against the generational propaganda being fed to us from every side. Nor did we have the ability to vote to stop it at any point before the information age. So please don’t throw all American’s under the same umbrella as our government, past or present. Many of us were born into this mess and have been powerless to stop it our entire lives. We may never get a chance to make amends for our past, at this rate, but not for a lack of trying.
Or, if you prefer, we can lump all current citizens of any nation in with their government’s past. Probably wouldn’t seem fair to blame all Canadians for their treatment of native people and the indoctrination schools containing mass graves of Inuit children that seem to turn up regularly, aye?