Viktoriia Bulavina had just finished the final interview in her green card application when the officer asking questions said she needed to step out of the room.
A moment later, the officer returned. Behind her were two federal agents.
The agents said they were taking Bulavina to a federal detention center according to her husband Victor Korol, who had come with her to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) building in downtown San Diego last Thursday. They handcuffed Bulavina and led her away.
The couple had worried about attending the interview. A week earlier, Bulavina’s attorneys had warned them that ICE had begun to arrest people at their green card appointments in San Diego, accusing them of overstaying their visas.
But Bulavina, who fled the war in Ukraine, had entered the U.S. legally under a humanitarian program. Her attorneys said she still had legal status to be in the country. Korol, a U.S. citizen, believed his wife would be safe.
Instead, for days he didn't know where she was.
“I think it’s politics playing out in an ugly way,” said Korol, 53, in an interview Friday evening. “But for Viktoriia, for her kids, for me, for everybody, this is not a joke.”
Immigration lawyers who represent Bulavina say her detention marks a new escalation in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
As reported by KPBS and other news outlets, federal officials have in recent weeks begun targeting immigrants coming in for green card interviews who have allegedly overstayed their visas. San Diego immigration lawyers say ICE has already arrested dozens of people who’ve come in for these interviews.
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Those arrests have been particularly disturbing to immigration attorneys because people who reach the interview stage of their green card application have already gone through extensive background checks and have no violent criminal history. The interview is their final step to becoming a permanent resident.
But Bulavina’s case stands apart from those previous detentions, said Caroline Matthews, a supervising attorney at the San Diego-based immigration law clinic Pathways to Citizenship. That’s because Bulavina’s legal status to be in the U.S. has never expired at any point, Matthews said, meaning federal agents would have had no possible charge to even seek her detention.
“A person who has done everything right is, right now as we speak, unfindable,” Matthews said Friday night. “How is that the aspirational goal of this nation?”
KPBS reached out to an ICE spokesperson on Sunday with questions and seeking comment, but the agency had not responded by Monday afternoon.
As the evening light shone through the trees in the front yard of their home in the Rancho Penasquitos neighborhood of San Diego, Korol said he and Bulavina have brought one particular thing to each others’ lives: steadiness.
Four years ago, Bulavina, 47, was living in Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city — near the country’s northeastern border with Russia. She ran a business installing window blinds and shades, Korol said.
When Russian military forces invaded in February 2022, they struck Kharkiv with rocket shells and sent soldiers into the streets. Bulavina fled along with half of the city, leaving the country for Italy, Korol said.
That September, Matthews said, Bulavina moved to the U.S. through Uniting for Ukraine, a streamlined immigration process created by the Biden administration. The process, known as humanitarian parole, created a pathway for displaced Ukrainian citizens and their immediate family members to come to the U.S. and stay temporarily.
Back in San Diego, Korol was dealing with some turbulence in his own life.
Korol is an engineer who has worked on communication chips for companies like Qualcomm, he said, and has lived in the U.S. since 2006. Like Bulavina, he is Ukrainian with roots in Kharkiv.
In the summer of 2024, Korol was diagnosed with lymph node cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy. The treatment took his energy, leaving him tired and feeling very sick at times.
When Bulavina and he met on Tinder, they were able to be there for each other in different ways, Korol said. They had shared roots and language. They both had children. But more than that, they both connected on a personal level.
In November 2024, they got married.
“We kind of really match in a way that we can help each other,” Korol said.
At the same time, Bulavina and her lawyers at Pathways had been working to maintain her legal status and apply for permanent residency.
First, Bulavina had applied and gotten approved for a second type of immigration status called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
According to the American Immigration Council, the U.S. grants TPS to certain groups of people whose home countries are experiencing a civil war, environmental catastrophe or another problem that would make it unsafe for them to go back. TPS includes a work permit and protection from deportation.
TPS for Ukrainians, including Bulavina, was set to expire earlier this year. But in January, the U.S. re-designated the country, extending those protections to 2026. That same month, Bulavina’s attorneys said, she applied to renew her status.
While her renewal application was pending, Bulavina began the application process for a green card with her husband’s support. Korol, who had also been through the green card process, was familiar with the steps.
USCIS scheduled Bulavina’s interview for December.
But when the couple went to the federal building in downtown San Diego with one of their attorneys last week, they were met by the ICE agents after the interview, Korol and Matthews said.
“It was kind of disorienting,” Korol said. “I was trying to convince them to look at our paperwork … but they were not going to exercise the discretion.”
To Matthews, the federal government had no legal basis for taking Bulavina from that room.
“If they're trying to say that Viktoriia was not in status, that has got to be one of the most novel arguments I have ever heard,” she said. “It really does seem like we’re grasping at straws.”
Bulavina had followed U.S. immigration rules to the letter, Matthews said. And more than that, she added, Bulavina had built a life in the U.S. She had worked, met someone she loved and gotten married — despite all she had gone through back in Europe.
Now, Matthews said, Bulavina is being held in detention as if she is a prisoner.
“The law seems to change almost daily,” Matthews said. “And no one should want that. We should all want to know what are the rules, what are the laws and how do I adhere to them.”
The U.S. government has detained more and more immigrants without criminal records amid the White House’s deportation effort. In July, NPR reported that about half of the people detained by the U.S. government did not have a criminal record.
Right now, Matthews is focused on finding Bulavina and getting her out of the federal detention system. On Friday, she said she was considering filing a writ of habeas corpus petition, a last-ditch effort which KPBS previously reported immigration lawyers have been increasingly turning to in order to free their clients from federal detention.
As of Monday morning, ICE’s detainee locator system showed Bulavina being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
Korol is focused on holding things together for their family. He’s organized a letter-writing campaign for Bulavina and reached out to news outlets and members of Congress to plead for her release.
He takes some comfort in the knowledge that Bulavina has been through worse. But the fact that they have been unable to get in contact with her at times has deeply frustrated him.
Above all, Korol said, he is trying to be there for Bulavina in the same way that she has been there for him since they first met, two years ago.
“As I said, we give each other this steadiness,” he said. “So it’s my turn now.”
