The Extraordinary Statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti 15 to statelessness results in the most egregious of harms.23 In January 2016, Budlakoti was incarcerated on a new charge and subsequently released in August 2016 under strict monitoring and curfew conditions and subject to unannounced visits to his residence from Canadian Border Services Agency officials. At different points, Budlakoti’s citizenship extinguishment involved the seizure by authorities of those documents which had long been “proof” of his legal identity as a citizen (e.g., his passport and later his birth certificate). Thus far, Budlakoti has engaged in a fruitless round of litigation to regain his Canadian citizenship, having had his case decided first by Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) officials and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), and then heard by the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. The courts have refused to decide on “a factual matter” that had already been decided upon by the IRB. Thus, the IRB can be said to have enlisted the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal to form an “eddy” of common opinion regarding the “factual matter” (the dates of Budlakoti’s parents’ cessation of employment with the Indian High Commission). The courts have also refused to provide a bare declaration of citizenship, arguing that Budlakoti had not exhausted all avenues or grounds for acquiring citizenship either in Canada or in India, the country of his parents’ birth. In January 2016, the Supreme Court declined Budlakoti’s request for leave to appeal. His legal team has since worked to prepare an application under the Citizenship Act to the Citizenship Minister, assembling the documents that provide an alternative narrative to the “administrative error” and “diplomatic exception” stories created through the documental networks of the IRB and Canadian courts. The “Diplomatic Exception” to Birthright Citizenship I will now turn to one of the key junctures or interaction of elements in the networked production of Deepan’s statelessness – the rulings of immigration officials, an IRB tribunal, the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal that Budlakoti was not a Canadian citizen under paragraph 3(1)(a) of the Canadian Citizenship Act. Thus far, all administrative and legal rulings have argued against the suggestion that the Canadian government revoked Budlakoti’s citizenship. Rather, they contend that Budlakoti had never been a Canadian citizen, as the offspring of parents employed by the Indian High Commission at the time of his birth; as such, his citizenship status was governed by section 3(2) of the Citizenship Act, which prohibited Canadian 23 Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958), was a federal case in the United States in which the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that it was unconstitutional for the government to revoke the citizenship of a U.S. citizen as a punishment. Chief Justice Earl Warren described citizenship revocation as “a form of punishment more primitive than torture” as it inflicts the “total destruction of the individual's status in organized society” and “subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress.” Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017