Ukraine's honorary consul in Oklahoma has spent two months publicly fighting ICE.
Not privately. Not through channels. In a newspaper, on the record, with documents — a consular representative of Ukraine taking a public side against a Republican administration's immigration enforcement. (https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/article_a594cdf6-c840-4bfa-b63d-6c1561992c98.html)
The concerns underneath it are real. Ukrainian truck drivers, most of them here under Uniting for Ukraine, are being stopped for a bad tail light and ending up in a detention center in Cushing. Nobody at this organization thinks that's right.
But when a Ukrainian official says it publicly, it stops being a story about seven truck drivers. It becomes a story about Ukraine picking a team in America's angriest domestic argument.
We have seen how that ends.
In September 2024, six weeks out from a presidential election, President Zelensky toured a munitions plant in Pennsylvania flanked by Democratic officials. Whatever the intent, half of Washington read it as a campaign stop. The Speaker demanded Ukraine's ambassador be fired. Oversight opened an investigation. Republicans who had been dependable votes spent the next year treating Ukraine as a partisan project rather than a national interest. One afternoon did more damage than anything Moscow's information operations pulled off all year.
We cannot run that play again. Not now, and not over immigration.
Meanwhile, look at what's sitting in front of Congress.
Thirty-one House Democrats have signed onto the Ukraine Adjustment Act. One of them has also co-sponsored the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. One. In the Senate, ten of the eleven votes against sanctions came from Democrats, several from the party's progressive wing — Sanders and Warren among them.
That gap is the whole problem. The energy is going to the bill that manages the symptom instead of the bill that ends the cause.
Because ask why those drivers are in limbo at all. Parole status, re-parole applications, protection that expires on a clock — every bit of it exists because the war is still going. Their status is temporary because their displacement was supposed to be temporary. None of that resolves until Ukraine wins.
The best thing anyone can do for Ukrainians in America is help Ukraine win the war.
The sanctions bill goes at the revenue funding that war, and its path is narrow. The Republican majority in the House is thin and some members will defect. The Speaker doesn't schedule votes he isn't confident he'll win. Without a visible bloc of Democrats behind it, the bill never reaches the floor at all.
This bill can pass. The only thing that reliably kills it is us — pulling attention somewhere else at the exact moment it's needed here, and handing both parties a reason to treat Ukraine as somebody's domestic wedge.
Don't turn Ukraine into a partisan football.
Here's what we need from you.
Tell your representative to co-sponsor the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. It takes under two minutes:
→ amukr.org/cosponsor-the-sanctioning-russia-and-iran-act-of-2026
If your member already signed the Ukraine Adjustment Act, say so — then ask them to put their name on this one too. Any office already on record for Ukrainian families here is the easiest yes in the building. Somebody just has to ask.
Thank you,
American Ukraine Committee amukr.org