The Extraordinary Statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti 21 involving prison officials, racial profiling and bordering processes, immigration administrative tribunals, the Citizenship Act, discourses of fit citizenship, documents in more than one country, other realms of (e.g., criminal, anti-terrorism) law, the courts, lawyers and judges. Immigration lawyers such as Barbara Jackman are critical of the manner in which under the Conservative government, the Canadian courts have built case law in terms of a stack of negative cases, which permit the cavalier extinguishment of an appellant’s citizenship and human rights. Referring to a context of “gutting of Charter Rights since the Supreme Court imposed a standard of ‘reasonableness’,” Jackman (2014) argues the “the ability of people to challenge cases…has gone experientially down since the Supreme Court imposed that standard [of reasonableness].” She specifically refers to Justice Phelan’s Federal Court ruling extinguishing Budlakoti’s citizenship, as the “most demeaning decision in terms of Deepan’s rights as a human being” (see Budlakoti vs. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) 2014, FC 855). How is it the case that once the “error” (of daily treating and confirming a person’s citizenship all his life) is unearthed, the courts can decide that their course of action need not be, in Justice Phelan’s words, “the least impairing imaginable,” but only necessary to ensure that “the law falls within a range of reasonable alternatives” (Budlakoti, FC 2014 855, para 77)? As I have argued in this paper, certain “simple facts of law” such as the diplomatic exception to birthright citizenship in the Canadian Citizenship Act are worthy of scrutiny as they hold tremendous power over persons’ lives. The regulation of this diplomatic exception is clearly not cut and dry: as a document-requiring nation, Canada has relied on birth certificates for issuance of citizenship cards, thus permitting an untold number who might technically fit the diplomatic exception to slip by without notice, to have their lives legitimated through a legal documental network produced by multiple agencies that reinforces their Canadianness. For those, like Budlakoti, who are documented citizens all their lives, the courts need to import richer, more rights-based and genuine link notions of citizenship rather than snuff out their citizenship on the basis of a technicality. This is the argument made by Budlakoti (e.g., in 2013 at the Federal Court) where he “emphasized the importance of citizenship to personhood and one’s sense of belonging and well-being” (Budlakoti v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2014 FC 855, para. 18). This historically prior legal documental network, that establishes that Budlakoti was since birth a Canadian, needs to be identified and enrolled to contest the administrative error and diplomatic exception stories narrated in tribunal and court decisions that argue Budlakoti was never a Canadian citizen. This is precisely what Budlakoti himself and the Justice for Deepan committee (online and through various events) are attempting to do in an ongoing campaign to educate various publics and elected officials about the injustice of Budlakoti’s citizenship extinguishment, while Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017