Living in the shadows: Stateless people face unique perils during Trump’s crackdown

Of note:

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….

Source: Living in the shadows: Stateless people face unique perils during Trump’s crackdown