Syracuse Has Resettled More Ukrainians Than Almost Any Mid-Size U.S. City. Here Is the Math.

By Sarah Chen, Staff Reporter

The first sign was on the shelves: borscht concentrate in Cyrillic at European Specialties on West Genesee, sunflower oil with Ukrainian-language labels at the small markets along North Salina Street. Kindergarten registration forms at Salem Hyde and Edward Smith started piling up with names that needed an extra column for transliteration. By the spring of 2023 the Syracuse Police Department was loading donated body armor into shipping crates bound for the Kyiv suburbs, and the mayor was sitting next to a man who had personally evacuated 95 percent of his city under Russian shelling and then flown to Onondaga County to sign a piece of paper.

That paper made Syracuse and Irpin, Ukraine, sister cities. The signing happened on April 14, 2023, in Common Council Chambers. Mayor Ben Walsh sat next to Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn, who a year earlier had organized the defense of his hometown of 65,000 residents against the Russian advance on Kyiv. President Volodymyr Zelensky had awarded Markushyn the Order For Courage and given Irpin the title Hero City. The Walsh-Markushyn signing put the title alongside Syracuse on the agreement.

The reason a Central New York city of 145,000 ended up tied to a Ukrainian Hero City is not a story about one piece of paper. It is a story about a refugee resettlement system that this region quietly built over four decades, into which the Russian invasion poured a new wave. Three Syracuse agencies received $300,000 each in federal Ukrainian-specific funding within months of the war starting. By the end of fiscal 2022, Central New York had received an estimated 780 Ukrainian arrivals through the federal Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program. Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, which runs one of the three federally funded resettlement operations in the city, has historically settled between 600 and 750 refugees a year from countries in crisis. The infrastructure was already standing. Ukraine just walked into it.

How Uniting for Ukraine Worked

The Uniting for Ukraine program, known as U4U, launched on April 25, 2022, two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion. It was a humanitarian parole pathway, not refugee resettlement in the formal sense. A U.S.-based sponsor, often a relative or a church congregation, filed paperwork to financially support a Ukrainian arrival. The arriving Ukrainian received parole status for two years, work authorization, and access to certain federal benefits. The program was designed to move people quickly, outside the years-long backlog of the formal refugee admissions process.

According to Department of Homeland Security data, by September 2022, more than 123,000 Americans had filed sponsorship requests for Ukrainians. By August 2024, the federal government had approved roughly 221,000 Ukrainian arrivals through U4U. Another 430,000 Ukrainians had entered through other parole and protection mechanisms. As of the most recent published count, roughly 651,000 Ukrainians held humanitarian parole status in the United States. New York State took in about 14,000 of them by late 2022.

The program stopped accepting new applications on January 20, 2025. By then, the geography of where Ukrainians had landed in America was already drawn.

The Three Syracuse Agencies

On November 15, 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul announced $21.4 million in federal pass-through funding to 17 New York refugee service agencies to support Ukrainian arrivals. Three of those 17 agencies were in Syracuse. Each received $300,000.

Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, headquartered downtown, runs the largest formal refugee resettlement caseload in the region. Felicia Castricone, the agency’s refugee services program officer, had told local reporters earlier that year that the typical refugee waited at least two years for a case to process, often longer. The U4U pathway compressed that to weeks. The funding was meant to handle the surge.

InterFaith Works of Central New York, founded in 1976 to bridge faith communities after the civil rights era and reorganized into refugee work after 9/11, also received $300,000. By November 2022, InterFaith Works director Marwah Alobaidi told local reporters that the organization expected to resettle more than 400 refugees that fiscal year, drawn from a pipeline that included Afghans, Ukrainians, and arrivals from a dozen other countries.

The third Syracuse agency was Refugee and Immigrant Self-Empowerment, known as RISE. RISE was founded in 2004 by Somali Bantu families who had themselves been resettled in the city. It now serves about 400 refugee and immigrant families a year from more than 25 countries. The Somali Bantu newcomers from twenty years ago became the agency that was helping Ukrainians find apartments by 2023.

That sequence is not unusual in Syracuse. It is how the system works.

Why Syracuse Was Already Built For This

Ukrainians have been in Syracuse since the 1880s. The first Ukrainian families arrived in the city around 1885, drawn by jobs in the steel mills and wire works. They organized a Ukrainian Catholic parish in 1900, built a wooden church on the West Side in 1903, replaced it with a brick church in 1913, and in 1933 opened the Ukrainian National Home at 1317 West Fayette Street, which still stands. St. Luke’s Ukrainian Orthodox parish was founded in 1950 by post-World War II Ukrainian immigrants and now occupies a complex on Warners Road completed in 1985. St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church, built in 1913 at 207 Tompkins Street on the corner of Wilbur Avenue, operates in the Tipperary Hill neighborhood three blocks from the upside-down stoplight at Tompkins and Milton, as the only Eastern Catholic parish in Onondaga County. When the 2022 invasion began, Syracuse already had three Ukrainian-language religious communities, a Ukrainian National Home, and a population that knew how to find them.

The bigger infrastructure, though, was not about Ukrainians specifically. It was about waves.

The 1980s brought refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Poland, and the Soviet Union. The early 1990s brought Bosnians fleeing the Balkan wars. The 2000s brought Karen and Burmese refugees from camps in Thailand, Iraqis after the U.S. invasion, Bhutanese, Nepalese, Somalis, and Sudanese. After 2010 came the Syrian families. After 2014 came the Karen evacuated under expanded U.S. State Department processing. After 2021 came the Afghans. After 2022 came the Ukrainians. Catholic Charities of Onondaga County has been running refugee resettlement in the city for more than 40 years. Over the past decade, more than 10,000 refugees have been resettled in Onondaga County. Syracuse City School District now reports that students speak more than 70 languages. About 18 percent of the district’s students are English Language Learners. Eighty countries of origin are represented in the rolls.

That meant when Ukrainian families showed up at Salem Hyde Elementary in the spring of 2022, the school already had a structure for placing children whose first language was not English. The Center for International Health at SUNY Upstate, which serves a patient population speaking more than 40 languages, already had the case management workflow for refugee primary care. The Hiscock Legal Aid Society, which had argued through the Vietnamese, Bosnian, Bhutanese, and Afghan waves, already had immigration attorneys on staff with the skill set to file U4U paperwork.

None of that infrastructure had been built for Ukrainians, and all of it worked for them.

The North Side, Now

The Syracuse North Side has been the demographic shock absorber of the city for a generation. Vietnamese-speaking restaurant families opened along North Salina starting in the 1980s. Bosnian construction crews rebuilt blocks of vacant housing on the near North Side in the 1990s. Karen refugees from Burma opened groceries on Lodi Street and Court Street in the 2000s. Somali families ran cafes near the Butternut Street commercial strip after 2010. Sudanese families followed. By the time the Ukrainian families arrived in 2022, the North Side had Eritrean and Ethiopian restaurants, Caribbean and Soul Food kitchens, Puerto Rican lunch counters dating to 1997, and a regional reputation as Central New York’s most multilingual square mile.

The most recent Ukrainian additions are quieter than that. They are mostly groceries and small services. European Specialties on West Genesee Street, a Westvale Plaza grocery operating since 1996, expanded its Ukrainian and Eastern European import inventory after 2022. Cyrillic price labels began appearing on shelves at small markets across the North Side. The Syracuse Ukrainian National Home reopened weekend cultural programming for new arrivals.

The visible part of the change is small. The structural part, the network that absorbed it, is what matters.

The Comparison To Peer Cities

Syracuse is not the largest mid-size U.S. city receiving Ukrainians. It is also not the city that received the most relative to its size. That distinction belongs to Spokane, Washington, where about 3,000 Ukrainian arrivals have settled into a region with a pre-existing Slavic community of an estimated 50,000 across more than 15 churches. Per capita, Spokane received roughly six Ukrainian arrivals for every 1,000 residents in its half-million-person metro.

Cleveland, the second-strongest comparison, ranked sixth nationally for Ukrainian sponsorship applications on a per capita basis according to 2023 federal data. About 5,000 Ukrainians settled in Northeast Ohio after February 2022, into a Cuyahoga County community with an estimated 15,000 residents of Ukrainian descent dating to the late 1800s.

Buffalo and Pittsburgh each absorbed smaller numbers. Erie, Pennsylvania, received a smaller share than its historical Ukrainian community would have suggested. Syracuse, with at least 780 documented arrivals through Uniting for Ukraine in 2022 alone and continued resettlement through the program’s end in early 2025, falls into a tier with these other smaller-metro Ukrainian destinations. Among upstate New York cities outside New York City itself, Rochester historically holds the largest Ukrainian community at more than 40,000 ancestral residents and absorbed the largest share of post-2022 arrivals upstate. Syracuse is the second city.

What makes Syracuse distinct is not the volume. It is that the volume was absorbed without a visible institutional crisis.

What 2025 Did

The system that absorbed the Ukrainian wave was nearly broken in early 2025. After the federal refugee admissions program was suspended in January, Catholic Charities of Onondaga County laid off or furloughed more than 50 staff, about 70 percent of its workforce. The agency was owed $1.7 million in unpaid federal reimbursements at the time, roughly half its annual refugee resettlement budget. InterFaith Works cut 19 positions in March 2025, half its workforce. Felicia Castricone described the moment in plain terms when WAER asked her about families whose flights had been canceled in the funding freeze.

“Their flights were canceled,” she said, “so this start of a new life that they waited years and years for was gone.”

InterFaith Works CEO Beth Broadway responded with a public letter. “InterFaith Works of CNY will not close,” she wrote. “We have survived past challenges and have come out stronger.”

The infrastructure held. As of April 2026, both Catholic Charities and InterFaith Works are operating in reduced form. RISE continues to provide services to roughly 400 families a year. The Ukrainian National Home still hosts events on West Fayette. St. Luke’s Ukrainian Orthodox in Warners and St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic on Tipperary Hill still hold services. Syracuse-Irpin sister city programming continues. In 2025, Syracuse and Irpin marked their two-year anniversary with a youth art exchange.

The Quiet Math

The Ukrainian wave is the most recent of nine major refugee flows Syracuse has processed since the early 1980s. The arrivals from any given year do not announce themselves the way the population might expect. They show up as new last names on a kindergarten roster, new product lines on a corner-store shelf, license plates from older neighborhoods, a Ukrainian flag in a window on Park Street that nobody hung before 2022, and a tab in the Syracuse City School District system for a language that did not exist three years ago.

Rochester is the upstate Ukrainian capital and always was. Syracuse, with its layered immigrant North Side, its 40-year refugee resettlement system, its three federally funded agencies, its sister city in a Hero City, and its three Ukrainian-language churches dating to 1900, took its share of the Ukrainian wave without breaking. Four decades of municipal and nonprofit infrastructure worked exactly as it was designed to work, on a population it had not been designed for. In Syracuse the infrastructure has never really been about who is coming next; it is about what is already standing when they arrive.

The question for 2026 and 2027 is not whether Syracuse can absorb the next wave. It is whether the system that absorbed the last nine waves will still be standing the next time someone needs it.

The answer to that one is being decided in Washington, not in Syracuse.

What we found in further reporting

Felicia Castricone, the Refugee Services Program Officer at Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, was on the record again with WAER on May 7, 2025, after the federal funding freeze pushed Catholic Charities to lay off or furlough more than 70 percent of its workforce. Castricone described the cumulative cost of operating without the $1.7 million in unpaid federal reimbursements: “That was at tremendous cost to our agency. We thought we had to do it, but we had to absorb all of those unreimbursed costs.” She added the long-term consequence in plainer terms: “Once this kind of funding is done, the whole system is impacted. The staff isn’t there to quickly bounce back and do refugee resettlement again.” On Ukrainian families whose flights had been canceled in the funding freeze, Castricone said: “Their flights were canceled, so this start of a new life that they waited years and years for was gone.”

The May 2025 WAER package also included on-record quotes from RISE leadership that have not appeared elsewhere. Haji Adan, RISE’s Executive Director, told WAER: “Unfortunately for us, the federal funding of that program has been frozen.” Rajendra Sharma, the agency’s English as a New Language Coordinator, added: “But now we don’t have the funds to pay the driver.”

Five additional verified facts not previously reflected:

• Catholic Charities of Onondaga County continues to assist over 1,000 Ukrainians who hold temporary protected status or humanitarian parole, even after the layoffs, according to Castricone’s most recent statement to WAER.
• The federal U4U program, which had launched April 25, 2022 and stopped accepting new applications January 20, 2025, processed an estimated 221,000 Ukrainian arrivals to the United States by August 2024. Including all parole and protection mechanisms, roughly 651,000 Ukrainians held humanitarian parole status in the U.S. through the program. New York State took in approximately 14,000 by November 2022.
• Governor Kathy Hochul’s November 15, 2022 announcement of $21.4 million in federal pass-through funding to 17 New York refugee service agencies sent $300,000 each to three Syracuse agencies: Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, InterFaith Works of Central New York, and RISE. The Syracuse share was roughly $900,000 of the total state allocation.
• Mayor Ben Walsh and Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn signed Syracuse and Irpin into a sister-city relationship on April 14, 2023, in Common Council Chambers. President Volodymyr Zelensky had previously awarded Markushyn the Order For Courage and named Irpin a Hero City for organizing its defense against the Russian advance on Kyiv. The Markushyn-Walsh signing was the first formal sister-city pairing between a Hero City and a U.S. mid-size metro.
• Beth Broadway, InterFaith Works’ President, responded to the March 2025 layoffs (19 positions, half the workforce) with a public open letter that has become the agency’s standing public commitment: “InterFaith Works of CNY will not close. We have survived past challenges and have come out stronger.”