He came to the US as a child refugee from the former Soviet Union. Now he’s a father facing deportation to Ukraine

By Danya Gainor, CNN

(CNN) — Roman Surovtsev was prompt in picking up his two daughters from school every afternoon.

It’s important to him to be there for his smiley 3- and 5-year-old girls, peppering them with questions about what they learned and who they played with.

At home with his wife Samantha, he would always be facilitating the bubbles at bath time, meticulously brushing out tiny blonde and brunette ponytails, and tucking the giggling girls into bed after reading to them.

But giggles have grown quiet as the young girls wonder what happened to their loving dad, who, in their eyes, simply vanished this summer. The girls haven’t seen him in 107 days.

Surovtsev was unexpectedly detained during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on August 1, and never came home. Now, it’s unclear when his family will see him again as the father of two learned just days ago of his imminent deportation on Monday to Ukraine, a country ravaged by war, and one he hasn’t lived in since it was part of the Soviet Union.

His detainment stems from President Donald Trump’s determination to arrest and deport undocumented migrants en masse – an effort fracturing families across the country as communities watch their workers, schoolchildren and church members be swept up by ICE.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a CNN request for comment on Surovtsev’s detainment.

Surovtsev had never so much as skipped an event at the girls’ school before missing his oldest daughter’s fifth birthday later in August. He was still absent for his wife’s birthday a month later, then their wedding anniversary, and soon to be the holidays – Surovtsev’s favorite time of year to spend with his family.

Samantha has been telling her young daughters their dad is at work, and gave their oldest a locket with his picture inside after he was detained. She’s been wearing it more often in recent days, her mother said, asking the photo inside, “Daddy, come home.”

“They’re too little to understand, and there’s no way to tell them without making them fearful of their own country,” Samantha said through tears. She and the girls have been living on savings as they accumulate attorney fees, and she said she feels like she’s going through life as a single mom.

In a court filing on Wednesday, the Department of Justice confirmed it has arranged for Surovtsev to be removed to Ukraine on Monday. His attorneys say 82 other immigrants will be on Surovtsev’s flight with the same fate, and fear for their safety in wartime Ukraine.

“I’m afraid that my life will be taken in this war, and my girls are going to have to grow up without their dad, my wife is going to have to be a widow, and I myself will lose my life in a war that I know nothing about,” Surovtsev said in a video reviewed by CNN his wife recorded during one of his calls to her from detention.

Surovtsev found love, work and God after escaping Soviet rule

Surovtsev was born in the USSR city of Zhdanov – which has since been renamed Mariupol in present-day Ukraine – in 1984. After his father, a Chernobyl nuclear power plant worker, died from radiation poisoning after it exploded, Surovtsev fled the USSR at 4 years old with his mother and two siblings.

The family came to the US lawfully, forfeiting their USSR citizenship, and slept in a San Francisco church for six months before settling further north in Sacramento, court filings show. But poverty followed them across California.

Surovtsev was a young child when he began stealing small toys in an effort to hide that his family was poor, court filings show, and he was around 7 years old when he started helping his mother work by cleaning homes and law offices. What followed was a boyhood marked by struggles to get by in his adopted country.

In 2003, at 19 years old, Surovtsev began serving a 13-year sentence after helping some friends commit an armed carjacking of a motorcycle.

Surovtsev was released early on good behavior in 2014. Following his sentence, an immigration court judge ordered him to be deported, costing him his green card. He was placed into ICE custody but ultimately released by the US government on an order of supervision, after it determined it wasn’t likely he would be removed from the country anytime soon, and in that case, continued detention would be unlawful, according to court filings.

Without USSR citizenship or a green card, Surovtsev has since lived his life as a stateless person with a work permit, routinely checking in with ICE. He’s never violated the terms of his supervision order, his lawyers said in court filings.

As his family found relief from Soviet rule in the United States, Surovtsev also found love, gratifying work, and God.

In his early twenties, Surovtsev was baptized in prison. When he came to Christ, everything changed, his wife said. He met Samantha in 2017 while jet skiing with mutual friends in Orange County. The two married, bought a home in a suburb north of Dallas, started a painting business together and welcomed their two girls.

“He created a life here, and he’s being ripped away from it,” she said. “The person he is on paper is not the person he is now. Twenty years have passed since he committed that crime and a lot of life has been lived.”

Between juggling the family business and raising his daughters, Surovtsev was training to be part of a prison ministry where he could travel to jails offering religious services and support for detainees.

Then, he was detained himself.

At the Bluebonnet and Prairieland Detention Facilities in Texas he’s been held at since August, Surovtsev’s faith hasn’t wavered, his wife said. He leads a nightly Bible study with his fellow inmates.

Since he anticipates boarding a flight to Ukraine Monday, the group held an extra session this weekend to rally around him in prayer one more time.

“On Monday, the US government plans to deport 83 people to Ukraine where they will be conscripted into the army and likely killed. Ukraine is a police state where the population lives under martial law,” Surovstev’s attorneys Eric Lee and Chris Godshall-Bennett said in an emailed statement.

Neither DHS nor the Ukrainian Embassy responded to CNN requests for comment on the flight to Ukraine.

“Among the detainees are individuals who have lived in the US since they were kids. Many have US citizen spouses and children,” the lawyers wrote. “Some do not even speak Ukrainian, and others are not even Ukrainian citizens, having been born in the Soviet Union before Ukraine existed as a separate country.”

Surovstev does not speak or read Ukrainian. Having fled at such a young age, Surovstev has very little memory of the former Soviet town where he was born, his wife said.

Surovstev’s birthplace, present-day Mariupol, Ukraine, has endured some of the most devastating strikes and sieges from Russia during the war. The city’s infrastructure and housing were almost entirely destroyed, civilians suffer starvation, and thousands have been killed or displaced. Despite reconstruction efforts being promoted by Russian authorities, the city remains heavily damaged.

Lawyers say Surovtsev is close to regaining his green card status

The US government had run into trouble trying to deport Surovtsev before.

Having been born in the former Soviet Union, the Russian Consulate told the US government in early 2015 it had no records of Surovtsev, his lawyers wrote in court filings. The Ukrainian government also said at the time it couldn’t confirm his citizenship and therefore could not issue him Ukrainian travel documents.

Subsequently, Surovtsev was released from ICE custody in May 2015 without his green card but with an employment authorization document, a work permit, and was required to wear an ankle monitor for six weeks. He checked in with ICE every other week before his visits became quarterly, then annual.

“Often when he met with officers, he was told that ICE had made a new attempt to contact the embassy of either Ukraine, Russia or both, but that either or both governments had refused to grant him travel documents,” his lawyers wrote in court filings.

For years, he checked in at the kiosk of the Dallas ICE office, confirming details like his address and any travel plans. But on August 1, he was unexpectedly detained, and an officer refused to accept his stay of removal from his immigration counsel who accompanied him to the appointment, his lawyers write in court filings.

But now it’s unclear what documentation Ukraine may have for Surovtsev’s deportation or what changed from a decade ago, when the country couldn’t prove his citizenship.

“In 2014 and 2015, ICE tried and failed to deport Mr. Surovtsev to Ukraine when the Ukrainian consulate told them it couldn’t prove he was a citizen,” Lee, the attorney, said in a statement. “Now we are told Ukraine is giving ‘temporary passports’ to detainees, whatever that means. To this day Ukraine has never acknowledged Mr. Surovtsev is a citizen.”

DHS did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on Surovtsev’s detainment.

“He’s always complied, but we knew that maybe something would be different this year, just because of what was going on with this immigration crackdown,” his wife said. “We didn’t think that this would be our reality.”

His detainment mobilized Samantha, when she said she became his “assistant full-time” as she tirelessly drafted a legal team to get him out.

His attorneys successfully vacated Surovstev’s carjacking charge, essentially wiping it from his record, and will have him plead to a lesser charge that doesn’t have immigration consequences.

This change in circumstances would justify reopening his case, which his team has filed for, Surovstev’s immigration lawyer Jennifer Rozdzielski said, and Surovstev’s lawful permanent resident status would be restored if a judge agreed to dismiss it.

All his family and legal team can do is wait for the case to be heard, but it sits in a heavy queue of similar motions. There is no expedited process at the immigration court level, Rozdzielski said.

“As a result of securing post-conviction relief for a past crime, he is likely to receive his green card once again very soon. And he has also not been given the opportunity to express his fear of being deported to an active warzone,” Surovstev’s attorneys Lee and Godshall-Bennett said.

The flight to Ukraine is poised to take off before a judge could make any new rulings. The motion was filed on November 4, and his attorney estimates a two- to three-month timeline.

“Our family, our community and our country is not better off with him gone,” Samantha said. “Even if he’s remaining in detention, we just want time for our case to be heard. That’s all we want.”

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