U.S. sponsors apply to welcome 216,000 Ukrainian refugees under Biden policy
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Washington — A year into the war in Ukraine, Americans across nearly 10,000 zip codes in all 50 states have applied to sponsor the arrival of more than 216,000 Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion of their homeland, according to federal statistics obtained by CBS News.
So far, more than 115,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the U.S. under the sponsorship program, which the Biden administration set up two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale military offensive against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, triggering the largest refugee exodus in Europe since World War II.
In just a matter of days last year, millions of Ukrainians, mostly women and children, fled the country. While some have returned, eight million Ukrainian refugees remain scattered across Europe, in countries like Poland and Germany, according to the United Nations. Another five million have been internally displaced inside Ukraine.
By all measures, the U.S. sponsorship program, called Uniting for Ukraine, is an unprecedented policy, allowing tens of thousands of Americans to facilitate the entry of an unlimited number of refugees through a free and entirely-online application system that, in stark contrast to most immigration programs, adjudicates cases in a matter of weeks or even days.
It has also become one of the main symbols of the Biden administration's steadfast support to the Ukrainian war effort, which has received billions of dollars in aid and weapons from the U.S. Last week, during a surprise visit to Kyiv, President Biden vowed to continue American assistance to the beleaguered country.
Since it was created in late April 2022, the Uniting for Ukraine program has garnered interest from across the U.S. As of Feb. 21, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had received 216,210 requests to sponsor Ukrainian refugees from individuals living in 9,766 zip codes in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, according to the unpublished federal data obtained by CBS News.
Two-thirds of the Uniting for Ukraine sponsorship requests have originated in eight states: New York (28,974), Illinois (26,191) California (24,776), Washington (18,546), Florida (14,463), Pennsylvania (12,177), New Jersey (11,395) and Ohio (7,700). But Americans in 13 other states have applied to sponsor more than 2,000 Ukrainian refugees each, and only eight states have fewer than 300 sponsorship applications filed by their residents.
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