Published: 12:15 AM, 22 April 2026
US crackdown on immigrants breaches basic humanistic codes
Volodymyr Dudnyk was picked up by Ukrainian military draft officers almost immediately after crossing the border into Ukraine following his deportation from the United States. He was sent straight to a training center. Mass deportations by the United States are being regarded by legal experts as inhuman raids which breaches certain basic human rights.
“When I was on the plane to Ukraine, I knew what was coming. But I hoped that perhaps they’d at least let me go home first. Everything happened even faster than I’d thought. I never made it home; I haven’t seen my parents yet,” Dudnyk told CNN.
Dudnyk spent 51 days in boot camp, then a few weeks training as a drone operator. He is now fighting on the frontline in eastern Ukraine, where his fellow soldiers gave him a new military call sign: “America.”
In US President Donald Trump’s second term, the United States has cracked down on every form of immigration and embarked on a mass deportation campaign. While Donald Trump’s subordinates say that it is focused primarily on major criminals that it calls “the worst of the worst,” many of those detained have committed only minor offenses or have no criminal records at all.
This has brought deep uncertainty to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who are now at risk of being removed from the US. But for Ukrainian men of fighting age, there is an added risk. Deportation could lead straight to the front lines.
More than four years of war have left Ukraine’s military struggling with serious manpower shortages. Under Ukrainian law, all men between the ages of 25 and 60 are subject to mobilization. According to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, some 2 million are currently “wanted” for avoiding the draft and about 200,000 soldiers are absent without official leave.
Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since about 1966 amid a shutdown of the right to asylum and fear of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” crackdown. Encounters remain quite low in Mexico and Panama as well. Apprehensions inched up in February in what may be a seasonal springtime uptick.
Democratic legislators’ demands for reforms to the Homeland Security Department’s ICE and Border Patrol components have held up 2026 funding for all of DHS, even as those specific agencies have separate funding from the giant appropriation that Congress passed last July. Passage of a bill to fund everything but ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol appears imminent, while Republican leaders are considering using the “reconciliation” budget maneuver to guarantee three years of funding for ICE and Border Patrol without reforms.
