Socialist Equality Party (US)
Nov 15, 2025
On Monday, the Trump administration plans to deport 83 people from the United States in the first mass deportation to Ukraine in years.
If the flight is allowed to take place, the men will be flown to Poland and then driven to the border with Ukraine, where Ukrainian officials will conscript them into the armed forces and send them to the front. As one anonymous adviser to Zelensky thuggishly told the Washington Post while confirming Monday’s flight, “The US can deport as many as they want. We’ll find good use for them.”
Among the detainees are individuals who have lived in the US since they were children. Many have US citizen spouses and children who fear Monday’s flight like they would fear their spouse’s execution. Most do not even speak Ukrainian, and many are not even Ukrainian citizens, having been born in the Soviet Union before Ukraine existed as a separate country.
Deportation to conscription into the Ukrainian army is the equivalent of a death sentence. As one detainee on Monday’s flight told the Washington Post: “I deserve to get deported, but not in the war zone—not where the war is right now. How can you deport me somewhere where the war is?”
The Socialist Equality Party (US) demands the immediate cancellation of the deportation flight and the immediate release from immigration detention of each individual in question. Those who face deportation on Monday may face death on Tuesday. Not a single Democratic politician has so much as tweeted about the deportation flight. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, Mamdani and the rest are so hell-bent on presenting the corrupt dictator Volodymyr Zelensky as a beacon for “democracy” that they allow Trump to execute the flight with a cover of silence.
If Monday’s flight takes place, it will be the modern “Voyage of the Damned.” This was the term used to describe the US government’s 1939 refusal to allow the ship MS St. Louis and its hundreds of Jewish passengers seeking refuge from Hitler from docking in Cuba. The Democratic administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to allow the ship to dock and turned it back to Europe. A large portion of the ship’s passengers returned to Belgium and France. Between 200 and 300 of them were murdered in the Holocaust. It is a dark historic irony that the fascists and Nazi adulators in the Ukrainian government evidently made Monday’s flight possible.
The deportation confirms that the Trump administration is operating, as a rule, in brazen violation of the law. It is a direct assault on the fundamental international legal principle of non-refoulement—the cornerstone of modern international immigration law. Enshrined in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and reaffirmed in multiple subsequent declarations, non-refoulement prohibits any state from returning a person “to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.” It is absolute and applies regardless of nationality, status or political expediency.
The administration’s violation of non-refoulment principles is the immigration law equivalent of its systematic assassination of Venezuelan fishermen.
The flight is not the product of some formal legal accord, it is the result of a backroom deal cut by the corrupt Ukrainian government led by Zelensky, mired in a corruption scandal that implicates every level of the state. Who knows how many kilos of gold or air defense systems the Ukrainian government traded away in exchange for 83 lives. And even if those who face deportation somehow evade conscription, they are being deported into a dictatorship.
In a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, one of the lawyers challenging the deportations, Eric Lee, quoted the State Department’s own 2024 Human Rights Report on Ukraine. It reports “[s]ignificant human rights issues involving Ukrainian government officials included credible reports of. . . torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment;” “arbitrary arrest or detention;” “serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists.” The report notes that “[s]ome of these human rights issues stemmed from martial law, which continued to curtail democratic freedoms due to wartime conditions, including freedom of the press and legal protections.”
The flight also spells grave danger for the hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians who fled the country after the war began in 2022. Not satisfied with rounding up and brutalizing thousands of young conscripts within its own borders, the Ukrainian government is now extending its reach to expatriates living abroad.
This has long been a goal of the dictatorial Ukrainian government, and indicates that this flight is just the beginning of a broader campaign to fuel the Ukrainian army through a global policy of mass deportation. If Trump can deport Ukrainian refugees into the Ukrainian army, wouldn’t also Germany, France or Britain, where hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian refugees live? Last year, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in Chicago that the government was pursuing “repatriation” of those who had fled the war, declaring, “We have to win this war. That’s only half of the battle. We are facing enormous challenges—demographic, primarily… We will fight for our demographics.”
The modern-day Voyage of the Damned places added urgency on the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 26-year-old socialist imprisoned by the Zelensky government on baseless “treason” charges. Syrotiuk’s only “crime” was to oppose the NATO-backed war and advocate unity between Ukrainian and Russian workers against the capitalist oligarchies and imperialist powers driving the conflict. He has been detained for a year-and-a-half under deplorable conditions in Nikolaev.
That the US government would now forcibly send longtime US residents into this same authoritarian state—where political dissenters like Syrotiuk are silenced, jailed, and branded as traitors—underscores the criminal character of both the Trump and Zelensky regimes. The campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is inseparable from the demand to halt the deportation flight: both stand for the defense of democratic rights and opposition to the war which threatens to spiral into a nuclear conflagration.
The planned deportation flight is part of a broader assault on immigrants and refugees being carried out by the fascistic Trump administration. In Chicago and other cities, immigrant communities are being terrorized by brutal ICE raids.
Just days ago, on November 8, the administration allowed Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans to expire, forcing hundreds of thousands to leave the country or face detention and deportation. These actions come as the US escalates its military presence in the Caribbean and steps up threats of war against Venezuela. Overall, the attack on immigrants is the spearhead of the administration’s attempt to establish a dictatorship in the US.
As Monday’s flight shows, the persecution of immigrants is inseparably linked to the broader campaign of militarism, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights. The same oligarchy that is deporting refugees to war zones is waging an unrelenting war on the entire working class.
The working class must oppose Monday’s deportation flight with all its strength. It must come to the defense of immigrants and refugees not as an act of charity, but as part of a unified struggle against dictatorship, imperialist war, and capitalist exploitation and a demonstration of international class unity.
The fight to defend democratic rights begins with the defense of the most vulnerable—and it must be armed with a socialist program to put an end to the system that breeds war, repression, and inequality.
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