Stateless Individuals in the United States Estimating the number of stateless individuals in the U.S. is difficult for a number of reasons and there are no official data on how many stateless individuals live in the United States. Neither the 2000 nor the 2010 census inquired about statelessness.97 Statelessness and its consequences are not widely understood. Because of their vulnerability and lack of access to rights and privileges in the United States, it is believed that many stateless individuals in the country remain underground and hidden and thus would not be recorded in any immigration statistics maintained by the Department of Justice (DOJ), DHS, or other entities. stateless individuals.100 The Appendix to this report contains several charts depicting the various numbers discussed in this section.101 In summary, USCIS statistics provide that, during fiscal years 2005 to 2010, in addition to asylum applications from stateless persons pending at the outset of 2005, 628 stateless persons sought asylum affirmatively at the asylum offices,102 283 stateless persons were granted asylum, 23 were denied asylum, and 359 had no final decision reached on their application, but were instead placed in removal proceedings103 and referred to immigration court to have their asylum claim decided by an immigration judge.104 The EOIR statistics for the same six-year period indicate that 1,087 stateless persons sought asylum defensively before the immigration court, 463 stateless were granted asylum, 166 were denied such relief, and 295 either abandoned or For those individuals who have come into contact with the U.S. immigration authorities, typically by either submitting a claim for asylum or being placed into removal procedures, DHS and DOJ maintain some records of those who may be stateless. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) within DHS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) within DOJ maintain nationality statistics with regard to asylum claims processed by their agencies.98 Although the numbers provide some sense of the size of the stateless population in the United States, the quality of the statistics is limited by the lack of uniform guidelines across agencies for determining whether an individual is stateless99 and The break-up of the Soviet Union created legal and bureaucratic the unclear nature of the categories each obstacles that still affect people today. Here, a woman from Ukraine agency uses to designate potentially holds her expired Soviet passport. 22 © UNHCR/G. Constantine Challenges in Quantifying Citizens of Nowhere: