They did everything right. They followed American immigration policy, processes, and procedures to the letter of the law, and still, they face deportation in December.
In 2023, a Ukrainian family of five, helped by Catholic Charities of Wyoming to immigrate to the US as refugees, settled in Buffalo, Wyoming. They came from the city of Kherson in the province of Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine, where they experienced the ruthless, brutal attack of the Russian Army firsthand in February 2022.
Today, the family lives in Idaho, and faces deportation in December. Fr. Jim Heiser, a retired Roman Catholic Priest and former long-time Riverton resident, reached out to County 10 to share their story.
The family, who will have aliases in this story due to their fear of the stance ICE has taken towards immigrants, was loaded into a station wagon by the father on the third day of the Russian invasion, and they headed west across southern Ukraine toward Romania.
Aleksander and Anna Priatko, and their three sons, aged 16, 4 and 2 were suddenly refugees.
Fr. Hiser spoke about their decision to leave Kherson.
“The Russian army piled dead bodies in a central location and told Ukrainians who were missing family members they could look through the bodies. When they did, they were blown up and killed, the bodies were booby trapped.”
When Aleksander and Anna learned of this, they packed up their family and headed west. Before the invasion, Aleksander owned a profitable business, and Anna was a yoga instructor at a local gym. They were successful, middle-class Ukrainians when the Russians began shelling homes and businesses in Kherson, a city of approximately 300,000 people.
“They made it across Ukraine, a distance of over 500 miles, before they ran into a line of cars backed up eight miles from the Romanian Border,” Heiser said.
Aleksander left the keys in the car, loaded the few possessions they were able to carry onto his and his 16-year-old son’s backs, and began walking. The four-year-old walked the entire eight miles, and Anna carried the two-year-old.
“They had no idea if they’d be allowed to enter Romania,” Heiser said. “They acted on faith.”
Romanian officials allowed them to enter. They kept walking after they crossed the border.
“A nice man stopped on the road, picked them up, put them in a hotel, and took care of them,” Heiser said.
Soon the family was on the move again, this time to Austria for a brief period, and then to Spain.
“We contacted them in Spain,” Heiser said.
The “we” was the Catholic Charities of Wyoming, managed by executive director Genevieve Mougey, of Cheyenne.
Mougey has Ukrainian heritage; her grandmother, Helen Duletski, was a Ukrainian immigrant, her mother’s mother.
“It seems antithetical to how I grew up knowing what the United States means,” Mougey said of the current state of political affairs towards immigrants, “All those Ideals I learned in senior government class.”
Catholic Charities is a non-profit that covers the state of Wyoming. It was incorporated in 1964, originally as an adoption agency, and functioned that way for many years. In the early 2000s, they dabbled in mental health care, but that eventually closed.
Bishop Steven Biegler is the Roman Catholic Bishop for the Diocese of Cheyenne. It covers the entire state of Wyoming.
Catholic Charities has four priority areas. One is immigration services.
“Looking at the people who are living here in an uncertain place with their documentation status, we ask how can we help them to do what they need to do to update their status,” Mougey said. “Then Russia invades Ukraine and there is a bunch of instability.”
Mougey worked for 14 years in Washington, D.C. for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
One of their missions is called “Welcome Home.” It is a program to help refugees.
“Bishop Steven was very aware of the program,” Mougey said. “We identified a couple of places where we could build out some structure to help families in Wyoming.”
Mougey looked around the state to find a Catholic Priest who could facilitate the program from start to finish.
“If there is ever going to be a good take on this, it’s going to require the dedication and desire of a priest who understands hospitality and the need for this, that is Father Jim,” Mougey said.
“I knew that Father Jim was going to be the guy to facilitate and bring this about.”
A poem, “Home” by Warsan Shire, shares the state refugees experience.
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
The poem succinctly described the plight of Aleksander and Anna and their three boys.
“Nobody is leaving because they want an easy life, they’re leaving for the safety of their family,” Mougey said.
The United States and Mexican Catholic Bishops developed the Five Principles of Migration in 2005 and expressed them in a document titled “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope.” It has been adopted by countries across the globe and the Vatican.
Those five principles are:
- Persons have the right to find opportunities in their homeland.
- Persons have the right to migrate to support themselves and their families.
- Sovereign nations have the right to control their borders.
- Refugees and asylum seekers should be afforded protection.
- The human dignity and human rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.
“We can apply that to any of the Gospels,” Mougey said. “This is not a hard concept to say people should be treated with respect and dignity. It’s the application of our constitution. The unique aspect of what it means to be someone living in the United States of America. Everyone has guarantees to certain privileges and rights. It’s outlined in the First Amendment.”
That’s where Father Jim Heiser came in.
Heiser graduated from Archbishop Wood High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1972. He started college at Penn State but eventually transferred to the University of Wyoming, graduating with a degree in ag business in 1980.
He took a job in Riverton with the USDA, eventually moving to Executive Director of the Farm Services Agency.
He and his ex-wife had one son, Eric. They were divorced in 1986 when Eric was four years old.
“I was tapped on the shoulder by God and told to become a priest,” Heiser said. “I asked Father Stultz (the Catholic Priest assigned to Riverton at that time), ‘Can a divorced man become a priest?’”
He could.
“I said, ‘If I’m still single when Eric graduates, I’ll become a priest,’” Heiser commented.
In 2000, Eric graduated from Riverton High School, and Jim began studies at the Sacred Heart School of Theology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“I was sponsored by the Diocese of Cheyenne,” Heiser said.
After four years of study, he became a priest.
Catholic priests typically serve for six years in one location before being transferred to a new parish.
Heiser was at Gillette from 2005 to 2006, Worland from 2006 to 2010, Sheridan from 2010 to 2016, St. Stephen’s from 2016 to 2022, and his final two years at Buffalo.
While in Buffalo, he was contacted by Mougey.
“My grandparents were Ukrainian immigrants,” Heiser said. “My grandfather came to America in 1910. His name was Peter Wyscochansky. I was once asked if there is a person in the world, living or dead, that you’d like to talk to, who would it be? I said, ‘My grandfather.’ I’d ask him why he left Ukraine to work in an underground coal mine in Pennsylvania.”
In January 2023, Mougey contacted Heiser.
“Would you like to work to bring Ukrainian refugee families to Wyoming,” Heiser said of a conversation he had with Mougey. “They said I could tap into their resources. The last thing they wanted to do was to put extra work on the pastor.”
They used a five-person team to help the priest. In Buffalo, Rob Hicks, John Snyder and three other volunteers began working to get Ukrainian families in Buffalo.
Heiser began working to bring Ukrainians to Johnson County.
“A lot of them didn’t want to come to Wyoming; they wanted to go to Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and other states where their relatives lived,” Heiser said.
The Priatko family moved from Spain to Northern Ireland. It wasn’t a good fit. The middle boy was bullied in school because he didn’t speak English.
It was time to come to America. Before they could immigrate, they had to be vaccinated, processed, and heavily questioned.
They flew from Ireland to Denver, where Mougey picked them up at Denver International Airport. She drove them to Cheyenne, where the local church held a reception to welcome them to America and put them up in a hotel.
They soon were driven to Buffalo, where the local Catholic church had a furnished apartment for them with groceries filling the refrigerator and freezer.
“They had a noticeable sense of relief,” Heiser said.
On their third day in Buffalo, their 16-year-old son found a job washing dishes. Aleksander soon found full-time employment. Anna began teaching yoga classes at a local gym.
“A family in the Buffalo church gave them a car,” Heiser said.
The family lived and worked in Buffalo for over a year.
“The man who owned the business Aleksander worked for told me, if you have any other Ukrainian refugees, please let me know, they’re outstanding workers,” Heiser said.
Living in Buffalo, Wyoming, a town of less than 5,000 people, was vastly different than the lifestyle they had known in Kherson.
Anna longed for shopping malls, more opportunities for her children, and something closer to the life they had lived in Ukraine.
Even so, according to Fr. Heiser, life in Buffalo was good for the Priatkos aside from a neighbor who posted anti-immigrant signs and threatened their boys.
In January 2025, they decided to move to Idaho.
“I told them there were right-wing extremists in Idaho, but they decided to move,” Heiser said. “They felt it offered greater economic opportunities. The father and son found jobs working in warehouses for $19 and $17 an hour, but it was still tough to make ends meet.”
After the cordial welcome of the majority of people in Buffalo, and with growing media attention around ICE raids across the country, they lived in fear in the larger town in Idaho.
“Anna never knew if Aleksander or their son would return from work,” Heiser said. “If ICE grabbed them, they wouldn’t tell her, they’d just take them to a facility and never tell anyone where they were. She lived in fear.”
Anna home-schooled the younger boys and never left the house for fear of being attacked, or detained by ICE.
In July, the Priatkos had a daughter, something the couple had long hoped for.
Then it was time to renew their passports and immigration papers. There were only five locations to get this done: Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C, Texas, and San Francisco.
“They drove to San Francisco,” Heiser said. “I called a friend from high school who lived in Marin County and she took them in. They get there and are told that passport renewal is under suspension. They found a sympathetic bureaucrat and had their papers processed, everyone except the baby.”
On their second day in San Francisco, someone stole the diaper bag that contained all their money, credit cards, and driver’s licenses.
“The woman who found the diaper bag found a generous check from someone in Sheridan who had donated to the family,” Heiser said. “They called them, found out where the family was living and returned everything to them. The thief hadn’t taken the money or credit cards.”
Having the bag returned with nothing missing was the last good news the Priatkos had.
The Trump administration has stopped the processing of passports and is considering the deportation of every legal immigrant from Ukraine. The Priatkos don’t have much time. They’ve been informed they have until December 4, the two-year anniversary of their arrival in the United States, before they are deported.
“They’re looking to move to Costa Rica,” Heiser said. “They can drive there [in Costa Rica] and there isn’t any predatory action by the government against immigrants.”
Today, the family has expressed that they live in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night or of Aleksander and their son taken without notice by ICE.
“They did everything right, they did everything asked of them and it wasn’t enough,” Heiser said. “My heart bleeds for them.”
Their former home in Kherson is now reduced to approximately 25% of its pre-war population of nearly 300,000. The Russians have blown up a dam that provided irrigation water to nearby farms, and the constant bombing, shelling, and random killing of civilians has emptied out the once proud city.
The Priatko family wanted to find a home in the US, away from violence and uncertainty, but, despite following all the official legal channels, that may never be a reality.