The year 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and to commemorate that occasion, UNHCR, pursuant to its mandate,3 launched a global campaign to raise awareness and increase State responsiveness to statelessness. Among the many fruits of this endeavor, a number of states, including the United States, took action, made commitments to action, or both, to enhance the protection of stateless individuals.4 Specifically, the United States pledged to the following: Actively work with Congress to introduce legislation that provides a mechanism for stateless persons in the United States to obtain permanent residency and eventually citizenship; [and to c]onsider the revision of administrative policies to allow the circumstance of stateless persons to inform decision-making regarding their detention, reporting requirements, and opportunity to apply for work authorization.5 Almost all stateless individuals in the United States who are not also refugees have become stateless while in the U.S., usually through no fault of their own.6 This is so because stateless individuals often lack identity and travel documents and are rarely able to travel to the United States from elsewhere. Among the causes of statelessness for these individuals are that their countries have dissolved and they have not acquired citizenship in any of the successor states, or there are incompatibilities between different legal regimes that have left them without a nationality. In other cases, statelessness may be the result of discriminatory laws or practices or in some cases even punitive or malevolent treatment. The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees jus soli citizenship— in other words citizenship on the basis of birth on U.S. territory. In a number of circumstances, U.S. laws also extend citizenship to individuals born to U.S. citizens abroad. These protections ensure that the United States for the most part does not “create” stateless individuals, but does not offer a solution for 2 those individuals from other countries who have become stateless and find themselves in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized statelessness as a “condition deplored in the international community of democracies” with “disastrous consequences”.7 Despite this strong view, the United States law does not accord any protections to stateless individuals in the country, nor does it provide any avenue for these individuals to acquire lawful status or citizenship on the basis of their statelessness alone. Stateless individuals who have not been identified by the U.S. immigration system live in the shadows without any means to support themselves lawfully and in constant fear of exposure. Because they have no country of nationality, there is generally nowhere for them to “return”. These individuals are left with no alternative but to remain in the United States without any official status or protection, leaving them vulnerable to discrimination and poverty. Without travel or identity documents, travel within the United States is complicated and travel outside the United States is next to impossible—which often means they must live forever apart from family and loved ones. Stateless individuals who have gone through the U.S. immigration system and have a final order of removal issued against them experience particular protection concerns. Among these are extended periods of detention and the imposition of restrictions—“orders of supervision”—as a condition of release. Orders of supervision typically require regular inperson reporting to government authorities— ranging anywhere from once a week to once a year—and limit the geographic areas within the United States to which the individual may travel without explicit permission. An order of supervision may grant a stateless individual permission to work, but must be renewed annually, requires paying a fee of several hundred dollars for each request or renewal, and, because of delays in processing time, can Citizens of Nowhere: