When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, many Americans rallied behind Ukrainians in a rare moment of solidarity. Charity drives sprung up. Ukrainian flags hung from storefronts.

And in a corner of the Midwest that had sheltered Southeast Asian refugees a half-century before, Angela Boelens was determined to see her community become part of the effort to protect Ukrainians fleeing the war.

After months of winding her way through a detailed government vetting process, Boelens became one of the first Americans to bring over a Ukrainian family: the Hedzhymanovis (and their big, fluffy white cat, a Turkish Angora mix named Barzick).

Business and community leaders across eastern Iowa and western Illinois came together to help the family and other Ukrainian arrivals find housing and jobs. Boelens, a college professor, started a nonprofit called IA Nice that had helped more than 75 refugees resettle in DeWitt, Iowa, a Republican stronghold of 5,000 people just north of Davenport.

Some people now call the community “Little Ukraine.”

But the Ukrainian families that thought they had found refuge in DeWitt have been plunged into increasing uncertainty since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office to terminate legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had entered the United States through Biden-era humanitarian programs. Three days later, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suspended the processing of petitions and renewals for Uniting for Ukraine, a Biden-era program that allowed more than 240,000 Ukrainians to live and work lawfully in the country.

Even after a federal judge ordered the government to continue the Uniting for Ukraine program, many Ukrainians have seen their deportation protections, driver’s licenses and work permits expire with no indication of when, or whether, they would be reinstated.

And after the Supreme Court allowed the government to terminate, for now, a similar program for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, there is growing concern among the Ukrainians that they are next.

Stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts across the country, which touched off protests this month in Los Angeles, are adding to the Ukrainians’ fears that the protections provided by the Biden administration won’t shield them much longer, even though their new neighbors want them to stay.

“We are forcing people to either become illegal or to become a burden on the community, and that doesn’t feel good for these families, and it doesn’t feel good for the community, and it makes absolutely no sense,” Boelens said.

At their white-paneled home on a quiet street in DeWitt on a recent evening, Olena and Maksym Hedzhymanovi were trying to make sense of how the ground had shifted so quickly.

Olena Hedzhymanovi recalled waking up as missiles flew over their house in Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s northeast border with Russia. She began shoving the family’s belongings into suitcases, she said. Her older daughter, Anhelina, wept.

“Mom, please tell me this is fireworks,” Olena Hedzhymanovi recalled Anhelina, who is now 20, say to her. “ ‘No,’ I said, ‘this is war.’ ”

Her younger daughter, Sofiia, 12, said she had been preparing for an acrobatic gymnastic competition — “the first I had in my life” — but the building where she had spent months practicing was bombed after they fled.

For six days, the family took shelter in a friend’s cold, muddy basement. Then they sought refuge in western Ukraine, far from the border with Russia.

“It was very difficult to make a decision to pack my whole life into three suitcases and come to live in America,” Maksym Hedzhymanovi said. “We can’t imagine how to pack our lives again — three suitcases again and go somewhere again. Our big dream is to stay and live here, as we have already fallen in love with this place.”

It was a sense of civic obligation, along with the memory of her Polish American great-grandmother, that motivated Boelens. When her great-grandmother arrived in Chicago as a refugee during World War II, pregnant and speaking no English, an Italian American family offered her a home.

But over the past decade, Trump has led a growing segment of the Republican Party to embrace a deep skepticism of global cooperation and American leadership abroad, and he won Clinton County with 59% of the vote in November. So Boelens, a Democrat, worried that she would be dismissed as a “bleeding heart.”

She had initially planned to serve as a financial sponsor for just one Ukrainian family. Soon, though, she sponsored a second. Then a third family reached out. And a fourth.

She did not have the resources to take them all in, so she began to seek other sponsors to help. To her surprise, a banking executive whom she approached offered a plan. He persuaded about 20 business leaders to come together to raise more than $400,000 to buy two houses in DeWitt. Arriving Ukrainian families would be able to stay in the houses temporarily while they searched for jobs and looked for permanent residences.

Boelens, who served on several nonprofit boards before going into teaching college business courses, established her charitable organization to manage the funds, and the IA Nice initiative grew. A hospital system in the area gave them ownership of two more houses. A businessperson lent another. A farmer donated a car. Volunteers helped the refugee families find work, fill out immigration and loan paperwork, and enroll children in school.

Within three months, most of the newcomers no longer needed financial support.

Supporters of the group believed they had developed a model for helping refugees and immigrants settle in an orderly way. But as Trump campaigned for a second term last year, he and his allies were attacking the Biden-era programs for refugees, arguing that the protections they offered were meant to be temporary but were being exploited by people who intended to permanently stay in the United States.

In DeWitt and the Quad Cities, some Republican community and business leaders say now that they have been struggling to reconcile their support for Trump’s hard-line immigration policies with their frustrations over losing immigrant workers and the new cultural vibrancy the immigrants brought to their communities.

Students at Catholic and public schools have written letters to legislators in support of their Ukrainian classmates, and Boelens and IA Nice organizers have begun petitioning Congress to create a new immigration pathway they are calling a “Heartland Economic Growth Visa.”