LIFE AFTER LIMBO: STATELESS PERSONS IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION IN ACHIEVING A LEGAL SOLUTION DAVID C. BALUARTE* INTRODUCTION Mikhail came to the United States from Turkmenistan on a Soviet passport when he was twenty-two. This was the final destination of a long circuitous journey that began when his ethnically Armenian family was forced to flee Azerbaijan, his country of birth, during the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. He initially sought refuge in Russia, but faced strong anti-Armenian sentiments that kept him and his family moving. He entered Turkmenistan easily at a time when it was part of the Soviet Union, and traveled to the United States on a Soviet travel document at his earliest opportunity to seek safe haven. In the United States, Mikhail applied for asylum, but his application was denied because the harm he suffered was not considered sufficiently severe to merit such relief. He was ordered removed to Russia, or Turkmenistan in the alternative. However, Mikhail’s Soviet travel documents had expired and the independent countries of Russia and Turkmenistan did not consider him a citizen, and therefore refused his return. Mikhail was ultimately placed into detention while immigration authorities carried out efforts to remove him to Azerbaijan and Armenia. However, neither of those countries would take him—Azerbaijan, because it considered him Armenian, and Armenia, because it did not. Mikhail languished in detention without any clear solution to his situation. He applied for travel documents from more than a dozen countries, and was soon forced to recognize that there was no country * Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Washington and Lee University School of Law. I would like to thank the Equal Rights Trust, the Open Society Foundations, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for their support of my work on statelessness over the years. Thank you to Rick Wilson, Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, and the entire faculty at WCL for their support of my clinical work to assist stateless persons, and for their comments at a workshop on this article. Thanks to Mark Drumbl, Director of the Transnational Law Center at W&L Law, and to Christopher Bruner, Director of the Francis Lewis Law Center at W&L Law for their support of my scholarship and comments on this article. A special thanks to Amal DeChikera and Laura van Waas, Co-Directors of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, for their generous comments and insights. © 2016, David C. Baluarte. 351 Electronic copy available Electronic copy availableat: at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2796321 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2796321