ASBURY PARK, N.J. — After decades without a country, Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough finally has a home she can call her own.
Last November, she and her husband, Kevin Clough, closed on a charming, single-family home in the beachside city of Asbury Park, N.J.
"I was, like, crying … in the closing. Then coming here, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I own this,'" she recalls.
Her long and complicated journey began in what was then the Soviet Union, where she was born in what is now Odesa, Ukraine. As a child, her Ukrainian mother and ethnic Armenian father, seeking to escape political and religious persecution and instability in the 1990s, brought her to the U.S. in 1996.
Ambartsoumian-Clough and her family never registered as citizens of Ukraine, the result of bureaucratic chaos and changing nationality laws at the time. Unbeknownst to them, the family was actually excluded from registering as citizens of Ukraine or Georgia (where her father was from) because they fled during the post-Soviet upheaval. Ambartsoumian-Clough has spent nearly her entire life stateless — not legally recognized as a citizen of any country.
Though she is married to a U.S. citizen and is now a lawful permanent U.S. resident, the 37-year-old is still considered stateless.
Ambartsoumian-Clough is part of an invisible crisis in the United States. An estimated 218,000 people in the U.S. are stateless or at risk of becoming so, according to the Center for Migration Studies. UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, estimates there were roughly 4.4 million stateless people around the world at the end of 2023.
Now, President Trump's administration is pursuing an aggressive crackdown on immigration. That has included uncommon measures such as revoking naturalized citizens of their status and challenging the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship — moves that could potentially create an entirely new class of stateless people.
Together, these policies have made those living in the U.S. without any citizenship more vulnerable than ever, according to Laura Bingham, an immigration law expert.
"That's a huge concern in terms of [the] creation of statelessness on a massive scale," Bingham says.
In the absence of government action to help people in the U.S. without any citizenship, Ambartsoumian-Clough co-founded United Stateless, a group advocating for the stateless community.
And she knows the threat of indefinite detention looms over the stateless community right now. She says at least six members of United Stateless have been detained in recent months. Some have been detained for longer than six months, she tells NPR. Many have been continually moved around to different detention centers throughout the U.S., making it difficult to keep track of them, according to Ambartsoumian-Clough.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not respond to NPR's questions on how many stateless people are in its custody.
Many more members of United Stateless have been in the U.S. for decades and yet remain under supervision of ICE, Ambartsoumian-Clough says. That means they must do regular check-ins with authorities, which during the current crackdown by the Trump administration appears to be putting those individuals at greater risk of detention and deportation.
There's also a real risk of indefinite detention of a stateless person because stateless people are not citizens of any country and there is, technically, no place to return them to, Bingham says. "Now that's only amplified in this environment of third-country deportations," she says.
That's a Trump administration tactic where immigrants are being deported to countries that are not their own. Immigration advocates have fought this policy unsuccessfully. It resulted in immigrants from multiple countries being sent to Djibouti — after attempts to send them to South Sudan failed.
The U.S. has also sent migrants to El Salvador and the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. And it's considering adding Rwanda to the list of countries to which to send deportees.
"There's no protection. You're effectively the most vulnerable undocumented person," Bingham, who is also the executive director of Temple University's Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology, says of the stateless community.
Stateless individuals cannot obtain passports, birth certificates or other essential identification documents. And without legal status or these documents, many stateless people live in the shadows — unable to work legally, access higher education, open bank accounts, travel or access medical services.
"It just forces people underground," Bingham says.
For Ambartsoumian-Clough, it has meant years of job insecurity, difficulty getting even basic services like medical care and living with the constant fear of being detained or deported to a country she doesn't know.
"It is lonely, and it's a human rights issue," says Danah Aracena, who also came to the U.S. as a child and is also still officially a stateless person in the United States. "You're feeling violated every single day."
That's part of why she and Ambartsoumian-Clough established United Stateless. They wanted to create and build community for those living in the shadows.
And it's what Tanya Furlong was looking for when she found them.
On a sunny July afternoon, the three women sat in Ambartsoumian-Clough's kitchen — in the house that was once a dream — and shared their experiences of living with the fear, pain and shame that comes with being stateless.
Keeping silent
Furlong was born to a Ukrainian father and Russian mother and came to the U.S. from what was then the Soviet Union when she was 10. Now 45 and married to a U.S. citizen, Furlong is in the U.S. on a work permit and has to check in with immigration regularly. Her next immigration check is in October.
Haunted by an experience in her 30s — when she was held in detention for 11 months — Furlong says she's terrified she could be detained again.
"I don't know what's going to happen," she says.
In Ukraine, Furlong lived with her grandparents. Her mother took her on a trip — Furlong thought she was going to see her father. Instead, they brought her to the United States and she never saw her grandparents again.
To enroll her in school, Furlong says, her parents used a fake Social Security number.
"While in school, nobody knew that I was from another country. Nobody knew that I had no papers — even my closest of friends, my boyfriends. Because my parents always told me not to tell anybody. And I had such a fear that I never did," she says.
Furlong's isolation pushed her to use drugs, which she went to recovery for eventually. "I had no outlet. There was nobody in my life that could help me."
It wasn't until her 20s, after being in a relationship with her then-boyfriend of a year, that she finally told him she had no identification and no citizenship in the United States.
"And I got stuck"
Aracena's parents brought her to the U.S. from Kuwait when she was 4 years old. Like Ambartsoumian-Clough, she has lawful permanent residency — which she just received in June. She now lives in New York City with her husband, who is a U.S. citizen, and their young son. She's pregnant with her second child.
Aracena was born in Kuwait to a Kuwaiti mother and a father whose family has long been denied citizenship in the country. Kuwait has strict laws surrounding citizenship, where only the father can pass down Kuwaiti citizenship. Because Aracena's father is not a citizen, nor is she. (The nation has been harshly criticized for its citizenship rules, including revoking citizenship from thousands of people in the country.)
If the family had stayed in Kuwait, they would not have been able to get health care, benefits or jobs, says Aracena, who is now 33. So they made the tough decision to bring their children to New York City to seek asylum based on the fear of persecution due to statelessness, arriving in 1996.
Aracena doesn't harbor any ill feelings toward her parents.
"They're going to find a place where they could protect their children. And that's what they thought they were doing," she says. "They didn't know there's a difference between statelessness and a refugee."
And that's where the problems arose.
The family was able to travel under her father's Article 17 passport, which included Aracena and her siblings. It's a unique Kuwaiti passport given to individuals who are stateless. But the family's asylum claim was denied, and her father was deported back to Kuwait, where he lives now, still stateless.
"And I got stuck here in New York City," she says.
Aracena says she, too, was told to keep quiet about her family's immigration status. She met her husband, Giovanny Aracena, in high school. Even he didn't know about her status until much later in their relationship, she says.
Kicking the can down the road
The U.S. has eschewed any effort to officially recognize stateless individuals in the country or to adopt a legal framework that would give stateless people specific legal protections.
Most importantly, there is no direct path for stateless people in the U.S. to gain U.S. citizenship.
The UNHCR has called on nations to adopt the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which regulates the status of stateless people and provides for their access to fundamental rights, and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which lays out safeguards to prevent statelessness at birth and later in life. The U.S. has never adopted these provisions.
In fact, it wasn't until August 2023 that the U.S. adopted its first policy on statelessness.
That was when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) established a process for the agency to recognize stateless people in the United States.
It allowed immigration officials to consider statelessness as a factor in applications for benefits like asylum, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or other programs that allowed temporary relief from immigration enforcement and detention, Bingham explains.
But the Trump administration revoked that policy in June.
In a statement to NPR, USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser said the Biden-era 2023 statelessness policy guidance "added a cumbersome layer of bureaucracy to the process for making determinations — we fixed it by rescinding it."
But without this small piece of recognition by the U.S. government, the stateless community is back to square one.
"This reverts to the status quo before, where statelessness is a nonfactor, often a deeply misunderstood condition that can make immigration relief more complicated," Bingham says. "And there is no incentive for the agency to understand it or identify stateless persons, let alone offer some form of discretionary relief so that they avoid indefinite detention and possible deportation to countries where they have no connection."
When it comes to ICE's policy on handling cases of detained stateless individuals, the agency said in a statement that if "a stateless alien receives a final order of removal, they may willingly leave the United States for any country they choose, if that country will accept them. If a country is not accepting, ICE may try to find another country that is willing to accept the alien. ICE will attempt to secure a travel document to a third country, possibly one where the alien has previously held residence, has family ties, or some other connection."
In the absence of any real action by the government to help this community, United Stateless continues its goal of securing legal protections for stateless people.
For years, the organization has pushed for passage of the Stateless Protection Act, which would provide some legal solutions by allowing stateless individuals to apply for green cards after passing background and security checks, work legally, travel and access a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
Rep. Jamie Raskin and then-Sen. Ben Cardin, both of Maryland, reintroduced the bill last year, but it went nowhere.
"I think in English. I dream in English"
Aracena, Furlong and Ambartsoumian-Clough all have been in the U.S. for decades, living with the stress and fears that accompany being stateless. And now, seeing news reports of immigrants detained by officers while in court, picking kids up from school or sitting outside a Home Depot makes Furlong and Aracena especially anxious that they could be taken too.
Both women spent lengthy periods in immigration detention — an experience that still haunts them.
When Aracena was 15, ICE detained her, her mother and her brother for months in a facility in Queens, New York.
She shared a small room with three other girls, she says. She was strip-searched and forced to clean, wash dishes, vacuum and mop toilets.
"That shaped my life. I kept telling myself, 'Oh, like, there's no way this is happening to me. They can't do this to children,'" she says. She and her family eventually were able to leave because there was no country to send them to. Her mother and brother were forced to wear ankle monitors for years as part of their release.
"After being in detention as a minor, I isolated myself. The trauma that I went through in detention … that shaped my life differently than before," she says.
Furlong was 31 when she was detained following a traffic stop. Years prior, she had pleaded guilty to drug charges and served the required punishment, which included drug treatment.
But immigration authorities had flagged her case and she was detained. She was held at a New Jersey county jail for 11 months. She says she also was released because there was no country to send her to.
After she got out, she started having painful headaches. She awoke one morning unable to open her eyes. Doctors told her she was experiencing a brain aneurysm. She received treatment, but with no ID and no insurance, Furlong says, she never went back for regular checkups and medications. She still can't look down with her left eye.
Furlong cares for her husband, Michael Furlong, who injured his back two years ago and is on disability. She wonders: If she goes to her immigration appointment in October, could she be detained? What happens to her husband then? She is especially worried about potentially being sent to Russia.
"It really scares me," she says. "I have such trauma from being [in detention] for 11 months. And I was 30 at the time. Now I'm 45. Like I can't — I just can't."
Furlong says she will still go to her appointment check as required. This time — as she has every time she has had these immigration checks — she'll wear three bras, three pairs of underwear and socks, and a scrunchie. She laughs but is deadly serious.
"I'm prepared," she says. "It's sad. I feel like I'm more American than a lot of Americans. I think in English. I dream in English."
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