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“Go back to your country” is the most common trope I hear people throw around when they want to belittle immigrants in this country. The reality is that some of us don’t have a country to go back to.

I was 26 years old when my country disappeared.

The disappearance was literal. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. Most people witnessed its collapse through television broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and maps that suddenly required revision. I encountered it through paperwork. Paperwork, unfortunately, tends to outlive governments.

How the Trump administration’s DACA backlog threw the life of a stateless law student into chaos.

According to advocates, thousands of babies would be born stateless each year if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump. “That looks like a life in constant limbo of being afraid of being subject to immigration deportation,” Betsy Fisher, Advocacy Counsel for United Stateless, said. “It looks like long-term immigration detention, separated from family and imprisoned, without a place to be deported to. It looks like not being able to visit family members who are in another country because you don’t have a travel document.”

He danced through the war, through statelessness and through the death and destruction of his dreams.
Today, Ahmad Joudeh is still dancing

As the Supreme Court weighs whether to narrow birthright citizenship, one formerly stateless woman warns that stripping children of automatic citizenship would turn her lifelong fear and uncertainty into a reality for countless more families.

Hundreds in the U.S. have no birth certificate or Social Security number. Some covet this ‘off-grid’ status – but it means being barred from ordinary life.

Ending birthright citizenship has devastating consequences that would last generations.