The steel doors opened on February 27, 2026, because I endured and fought and proved in federal court that ICE was holding me the way a terrorist holds a hostage: no charge, no conviction, no lawful ground to keep me. I had sued the United States government from inside its own detention centre, and I had won.
I walked out of the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma with no status, no identification, and no money I could access. I had been inside for six hundred and twenty-four days — thousands of hours. I went in a young man of twenty-one and came out twenty-three, and all of it because the machine could not organize itself.
Ten of those months were in solitary confinement.
The general population unit was not a place where a human being can live: nearly a hundred men locked in one small room, no space that belonged to me, no silence, not even for an hour, and lights out at 11:30, lights on at 5:30 — sleep deprivation by light, a torture of its own. No zoo would hold a hundred animals in one cage. In a zoo, an animal has its own place, and in that unit I had none. I stood before a choice — that room or a cell alone. The only thing I hated in that cell was the clink of a guard's handcuffs on the rounds.
While I was in detention I did not lose the time — I extracted from it everything it could give. I learned to read and write Arabic, improved my English, and read books. And I learned about people from every part of the earth at first hand, living beside them in a cage, dealing with them every day: Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Balkans, the Middle East.
In immigration court I had a lawyer who helped ICE keep me incarcerated — it was my own counsel who withdrew my request for release on bond. In federal court I had no one, so I taught myself the law — on a computer with no internet, reading other people's cases. From my cell I wrote a habeas corpus petition and filed it; the government objected, and I beat those objections. The habeas statute gives the government three days to answer and sets a hearing five days after that; my case took five months, every one of them spent in that cell, before the court conceded that holding me was unlawful and ordered the release. The case is public: Dzyuban v. ICE Field Office Director, No. 2:25-cv-01919, Western District of Washington.
I walked out because I proved that holding me was against the law — and then I had to figure out where to go.
I needed to rebuild my life, so I returned to Canada. I had lived there before: after college in Donetsk I arrived in June 2022 and worked in food production in London, Ontario, and in the spring of 2023 I spent two months riding a bicycle from Ottawa to Quebec City — I like travelling that way, slowly enough to see the country. Later I went west, to British Columbia: Whistler, a job at the ski resort, and I took part in a youth program.
When I was detained in June 2024, I was already two years into a Canadian life. Canada was not a country I had chosen from a list — it was the life that had been interrupted.
Ukraine, where I was born, has issued me one document that has followed me through all of this: my birth certificate. I am from Donetsk, and the war came to me when I was eleven. For seven years my home stood an eight-minute drive from the front line. A few times I was under direct 120-mm mortar fire, and even once somebody threw a homemade grenade into my yard. Ukraine closed consular services — including passports — to men my age abroad, and by Ukraine's own law papers issued in occupied territory are invalid. My birth certificate has worked exactly once in my life: in 2022, under CUAET, Canada's emergency program for Ukrainians, it was enough for a one-time travel document, good for a single journey — the journey that brought me here the first time.
So on April 15, 2026, I crossed into Canada outside a port of entry with zero dollars in my hands. There was no ticket I could buy and no ordinary route I could take. ICE had lost my bank card in the mail, and no bank issues a new one to a man without documents; whatever money I had, I could not touch. I was locked in: no document, no access to money — and money would not have helped, because intercity carriers check ID before they sell you a ticket.
So I made about 4,500 kilometres from British Columbia to Ottawa — Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Edmonton, Brandon, then east across the highways. It took me a month and a week.
Mostly I walked, and people stopped on their own — sometimes a car would slow down beside a man walking the shoulder with a backpack, and a door would open; others stopped, then drove off as I walked up. There were days when nobody stopped at all. Near the end, on the approach to Ottawa, I began hitchhiking.
In the first days there were shelters — Abbotsford, Chilliwack — and after that there were none: I slept beside roads, in tree lines, in abandoned barns, and in one of those barns mice ate the shoelaces out of my shoes while I slept.
One morning I found myself in a dry field in Saskatchewan just as the ticks were waking after the cold of the night. I saw one and crushed it, then a second, a third, a fourth — from all sides — and I REALIZED: I was in the middle of their nest. The dry fields of Saskatchewan are not the best place to sleep. That day I killed at least seven and escaped a dozen more, and for the rest of the road it lived in my head: the feeling that one was on me right now, so I could not stop checking myself, and I hated it. The nights got more complicated after that: I had to wait for dark, so the cold would freeze them, and rise before the hour when they wake.
It was cold. I had no tent, only a sleeping bag, and one night I found snow on its hood — the condensation of my own breath, frozen. The cold does not let you sleep; the nights passed hard.
Most of the people who stopped for me were never asked to stop — they carried me across their country and asked for nothing in return.
On the road at that speed you learn simple things — such as what distance is: the forty kilometres that cost you a day of strength, a car does in twenty minutes. Later, that lesson would lead me to start a business in automation. You notice the distance between towns, the speed of everything that passes you, how the temperature drops after sunset. Different people picked me up, and there is no better way to learn a country than talking with its people: I took in an enormous amount — the best places to sleep, the standing of Indigenous people in society, where the country is heading, oil and how the soil is drilled, the military industry, how Canada funds its projects, education, business, real estate — how it is sold and to whom, even boats — how to sail them, and the people in Canada who sail them around the world. That is how I came to know every province I crossed: the middle of Canada had been something distant before, and now I have a picture of what it is — the climate of each province and its character, the animals and the water, where the drinking water is, where the people are, which places are growing and which stand still. A driver opens a door; someone gives you food, lets you sleep somewhere warm, drives another hundred kilometres because they have decided that you should not be standing beside the road anymore.
A month and a week is a long time to be carried by people you have never met.
In the third week of May I reached Ottawa — my feet worn down to nothing, not a spot on my soles without a callus. The next day I presented myself to the authorities and claimed protection.
After I arrived in Ottawa, Canada issued me a Refugee Protection Claimant Document, valid to 2032. Ontario still refused me basic assistance, twice.
The first time, they demanded a document that is only issued when a removal is being carried out — mine was deferred, so the document could not exist. I sometimes reread that demand just to make sure it says what it says, and it does. Then that demand disappeared and another reason appeared.
So I did to Ontario what I had done to the United States: I read the rules myself and filed. An appeal to the Social Benefits Tribunal. Two applications to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Access-to-information requests, each with a tracking number. The Ombudsman of Ontario. Members of the Ontario legislature, members of the federal Parliament, and committees of both houses. And the United Nations. All of it because a province refused me what the law says I am entitled to. Again, there was no lawyer — just me, the regulations, the forms, and the habit I had developed in the detention centre: a bird does not count on the branch which it holds — it counts on the wings which it has.
After a federal courtroom, a provincial welfare office does not frighten you.
I live in a transit house in Ottawa. In August I turned twenty-four and I launched my own business: Ontario registered my company, Assay Systems. We make businesses stronger with AI, and my plan is to empower Canadian business.
I crossed this country once by bicycle because I wanted to, and again on foot because there was no other way. The first time Canada was something I wanted to see; the second time it was somewhere I needed to reach.
I am not asking you to carry me. I am asking you to support me.