The war in Ukraine is on the doorstep of Southern California

TIJUANA, Mexico — On the outskirts of this border town stands the Benito Juárez sports complex, a recreational center that once housed athletic activities for kids but is now the premier destination for Ukrainians fleeing war and seeking to enter the United States.

Benito Juárez is a space of limbo for more than 2,000 Ukrainian refugees who can no longer return to their homes.

For now, they live in tents, gym mats or bunk beds, waiting to be processed into the United States.

Maybe.

Inside the sports complex’s gym, the entire width and length of a basketball court is slathered in mats serving as mattresses. Many refugees only have thick blankets or sleeping bags.

Bunk beds surround the perimeter of the court. Weary parents try putting their distraught children to sleep but without the sanctity of privacy. Families only get that if they cover their bunks with blankets or towels — most do.

A makeshift infirmary can be found towards the back, steps away from an abandoned wrestling ring. Volunteer nurses and doctors from UC San Diego and San Diego State University treat patients with burns or high blood pressure.

The outside of the complex is covered by lines of tents. During the day, those who are not socializing or helping wait anxiously for food, served by volunteers who in many cases work nearly daylong shifts.

This is the situation on the doorstep of San Diego sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Interviews with Ukrainian refugees on both sides of the border paint a picture of psychological scars, families being torn apart and arduous journeys to escape war with the hope of one day returning home.

"I always wanted to go to America — it was in my dreams — and now that I'm almost there, I don't want to go there,” Vika S., 16, said. “I just want to go home.”

Vika arrived in Tijuana with her mom, Anna, on April 11. They were sitting in the arrivals area of the Tijuana International Airport with their baggage and wearing coats more apt for Europe’s cooler weather than Mexico.

The war began Feb. 24. Vika and Anna spent its first two weeks sheltering in the basement of their dacha — a countryside second home with generational value common in former Soviet countries — in the province of Kyiv.

“My nervous system could barely handle it,” Anna said. “It was difficult psychologically. Every three hours, you hear[d] the sirens.”

Interviews with refugees were conducted in Russian and Ukrainian and translated into English. Most requested that their last names not be used because of their families in Ukraine and concerns over immigrating into the U.S.

Vika and Anna spent the first two weeks of the war sheltering in the basement of their dacha — a countryside second home with generational value common in former Soviet countries — in the province of Kyiv.

Russian forces targeted Kyiv during the first phase of the war but failed to take the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine’s military, far smaller than Russia’s, withstood the onslaught but later scenes have revealed the atrocities of war in sites such as Bucha or Borodyanka.

The killing of more than 300 Ukrainians in Bucha, about 35 miles from Kyiv, has been attributed to Russian forces by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. President Biden called for Russian president Vladimir Putin to face a war crimes trial.

Many, like Vika and Anna, felt like they had no choice but to flee.

“It was the most long and awful journey,” Vika said.

In the pitch-black night, all the train’s lights were off to avoid getting noticed. Like the other passengers, Anna and Vika sat still and silent, but their minds were screaming with worries of getting bombed or shelled.

Friends drove them to the border, and after a long wait, they crossed into Poland. Anna and Vika stayed there for about a month, during which they applied to enter the U.S. Anna was given an appointment for April 22 but they decided traveling to Tijuana was the easiest and quickest option — despite layovers in Frankfurt and Mexico City.

Anna and Vika plan to reunite with Anna’s older daughter, who has been living in Washington state since 2013.

“My heart hurts that we left everything [in Kyiv], our house, our friends, our job,” Anna said. “You feel like you’re just going nowhere.”

Anna and Vika’s story is not unlike Olga’s, a 65-year-old woman from Kyiv who now finds herself as well at Benito Juárez.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, she took shelter in her church’s basement for six days. Olga lived through the war for a month until a conversation with her kids about going to Mexico changed her mind.

“I am old, and was nervous, and crying and everything,” she said. “How can I leave Kyiv? But thank God. God gave me strength. I am a believer, many people prayed for me, and now I am here.”

Olga made the journey to Tijuana on her own, hoping to soon reunite with one of her sons and her two granddaughters.

“I didn’t want to go anywhere else,” Olga said. “Only here, or I said I’ll go back to Kyiv.”

Kyiv is not just Olga’s home, but also where she left behind her second son, who stayed to continue working at a TV station. Olga is one of the many refugees who has left a loved one behind in Ukraine.

“Of course,” she said, “my heart is over there.”

Olga also started her travels across the Polish border, getting to Chelm by train. She recalled hearing shelling while passing by the Zhytomyr area in western Ukraine.

Olga spent the next month in Poland, which has accepted the most Ukrainian refugees of any country in the world. She landed in Tijuana after stops in Paris and Madrid.

“People arrive and each one has their own tragedy and story,” Olga said, with tears in her eyes.

Most who arrive are either women, children or elderly. Many of the men are still at home, but fighting in the war.

Svyatik Artemenko, a Ukrainian Canadian, had moved back to his home country to pursue his dream of becoming a professional soccer player. He successfully trialed for a team and signed his name on the dotted line of the contract he always envisioned.

But one day later, war broke out.

He knew what he had to do and, like others in his family, traveled from his hometown of Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine to enlist in the military in Odesa.

“I’m here to protect my homeland, my home country and my family that’s living in Ukraine at the moment and all the people — [I'm] fighting for its for liberty and freedom,” Artemenko said in a phone interview from his Khmelnytskyi apartment. “I think it’s the right personal choice for me to enlist myself instead of running away.”

Over the last two months, he has traded a cushy college athlete life in Canada for one in the barracks defending his land.

Svyatik Artemenko: A firsthand account of what it’s like to be in Ukraine during the war

Tatiana, 39, is from the Zhytomyr region in northern Ukraine. She traveled for a month and a half through Warsaw, Paris and Mexico City with hopes of entering the U.S. through Tijuana.

The United Nations says that more than five million Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia's incursion. The displacement brought on by the war is the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II and one of the most significant in modern times.

Tatiana’s parents and brother, who she says is not allowed to leave the country, remain in Ukraine. Before fleeing, she describes seeing buildings on fire and a man dying.

Roughly 2,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since the war began, the UN estimates, although the actual death toll is much higher.

Ivan, 42, was living in a farm village by Kyiv. He escaped two days before Russia’s invasion began.

Ivan only knows what his hometown has become through pictures his friends have sent him. The village is now a mix of scattered landmines, fences ran over by tanks, destroyed schools and ruined homes.

“It’s traumatic psychologically,” he said. “Everything is destroyed, corpses [are] lying around.”

Ekaterina and her husband spent the first 20 days of the war hiding in fear of air raids in their hometown of Sumy. They would receive air raid alerts on their phones but didn’t know where to go as there were no bomb shelters or basements close by.

They were forced to find the least dangerous spots of their nine-floor apartment building, which meant crouching in the corridors away from any windows.

“You hear a bomb outside the window here and there, and you think, ‘Oh my god,’” Ekaterina said. “You just have to live through it somehow.”

It was even worse in the suburbs of Sumy.

As they were escaping, Ekaterina and her husband drove by houses that were destroyed. Many who hid in those basements and bomb shelters died because they were unable to escape.

In other cases, families were not only torn apart by the war but by the politics of it.

Ekaterina’s cousin lives in Russia. She tried describing the realities of the war to her, and the horrors she was seeing in Ukraine, but to no avail.

“She says to me, ‘If it was Russians bombing, they would’ve taken over Ukraine a long time ago,’” Ekaterina said. “No matter how much I try to explain to her, she doesn’t understand.”

What the Russia-Ukraine war means for neighboring countries with NATO aspirations

After being processed across the American border, many Ukrainian refugees like those at Benito Juárez stop at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

As soon as refugees cross into San Diego, they are met by volunteers at a makeshift camp filled with water bottles, Clorox wipes, chicken-flavored ramen, cereal, coffee, boxes of pizza and buckets of fried chicken.

These volunteers — from a variety of organizations, churches and nonprofit groups including Samaritan’s Purse and Calgary Baptist Church — are driven by the need to help others and, in many cases, their Ukrainian roots. They provide the refugees with food, internet, assistance and transportation.

“The situation has escalated, a war has happened,” Andrey Vox, a volunteer driver at the border, said. “We’ll help in any way we can.”

Vox is Russian, and runs a moving company in Trabuco Canyon in Orange County. He traveled on his day to lend a helping hand at the border because he has Ukrainian coworkers and feels an urgency to help

Vox worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., shuttling Ukrainians to their next destinations which can range from Irvine to San Francisco and elsewhere. Volunteers can take up to 17-hour shifts, and said they were glad to do so.

“We're just driven by desire and just to give people an assurance that they are home, they are safe, the stress is over,” said Olga Martinez, a volunteer at San Ysidro.

Martinez has lived in Orange County, more than 100 miles away from the border crossing, for 25 years but her mom is in Ukraine.

She is “fully dedicated” to helping, she says, and is active in the Telegram chat where volunteers coordinate donations and see what’s needed. Most recently, Martinez needed to go out and secure two wheelchairs.

On March 24, Biden said the U.S. would receive up to 100,000 Ukrainians but backlogged applications and Trump administration policies slowed down the process. That same month, just 12 Ukrainian refugees were resettled through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, according to the State Department.

Traveling into the U.S. through Europe had been slow and inefficient, which is why many Ukrainians were turning to the Mexico border — even if that meant waiting at Benito Juárez.

But now, that path is closed.

As of April 25, refugees will require a sponsor — a family member or non-profit organization — and will need to pass rigorous security checks to enter the country directly from Europe.

If refugees try to cross through Mexico, they will be denied entry.

The new guidelines are ostensibly designed to streamline the immigration process and make it easier for Ukrainians to reach the U.S. without any pitstops along the way.

"I don't know that the Biden administration ha[d] really set up a process for those individuals — for displaced persons — to come to the United States,” said Andrew Arthur, a law and policy expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies.

Most of the Ukrainians allowed to enter do so on humanitarian parole. They do not hold legal status in the U.S. but, when they crossed through Tijuana, only had to stay at the border for a few days.

“They haven't been admitted but they're being allowed into the United States temporarily pending completion of that asylum process,” Arthur said. “It can take years for an asylum claim to be heard.”

A State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. is "considering all options to expand legal pathways for Ukrainians and other[s] fleeing Russia's war in Ukraine."

The department also referred to the Lautenberg Program, a sponsorship effort to resettle religious minorities from former Soviet countries. But its operations in Kyiv closed in wake of the war and “Ukrainian Lautenberg cases in the […] queue are at various stages of processing” without “updated locations for most of them,” making it hard to predict how many Ukrainians will be moved into the U.S. and how quickly that could happen.

Anastasiya Lukaschchuk, a 25-year-old makeup artist from Kharkiv, left Ukraine the day the invasion started because her friend in the U.S. had warned that war was imminent.

On April 12, after a month alone in Poland and a pitstop at Benito Juárez, Lukaschchuk crossed into the U.S. and flew to Cleveland, Ohio to live with her great-uncle. She would not have been able to do this under the Biden administration’s new rules.

“I finally feel safe,” Lukaschchuk said. “I’m slowly getting used to America. For now, I like everything, but I think I still don’t fully understand that I’m here or that I’m almost 10,000 kilometers away from my home.”

Lukaschchuk doesn’t even if she will even be able to work in the U.S. — refugees on humanitarian parole must apply for work authorization, although it generally gets granted. But what matters to her is having escaped war.

Because like many others, she is still holding out hope one day they will be able to see their homeland again.

“I would love to return,” Anna said. “Most importantly, to have somewhere to return to.”