Ethiopis is a co-founder of United Stateless, a national organization led by stateless people.
I feel like I have been born again, after a U.S. immigration court made a remarkable ruling in my “statelessness” case in June. I hope that my case will have significant, broader implications for other stateless people in America.
Being stateless means no country will claim you as a citizen. We don't belong anywhere. Stateless people are military veterans. We are Harvard graduates. We are Holocaust survivors. There are millions of stateless people around the world, and 200,000 such people in the United States.
My case is a single example of statelessness in this country, and we now need to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement acknowledge that stateless noncitizens need a specific policy, in line with a recent directive from its boss, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. That’s something it has so far been reluctant to do, prompting several prominent members of Congress to write to Mayorkas two days after the ruling came down in my case. In the meantime many stateless people continue to endure sleepless nights and unnecessary suffering as they worry about an ICE officer knocking at their door.
My own case dragged on for more than 20 years. It created more than 1,600 pages of legal documentation. The judge even apologized during my hearing that it had taken so long for me to get the ruling. I’m still having a hard time believing it. The case took a toll on my health. Every time I had a hearing approaching, I would get sick with anxiety. Now that I have some room to breathe, I hope we can clear things up for so many other people in a similar position.
I first wrote about my story a year ago. Until recently I managed eight gas stations in the D.C. area, seven days a week. For more than 20 years I worked 13-hour days and sometimes I’d work 36 hours straight. I was born in Ethiopia, but because my father was born in next-door Eritrea, I was targeted for my ethnicity. Based on my Eritrean blood, the Ethiopians tortured me in prison for three months. When I got out of prison, I fled the country. I've been trying to sort out my legal status since I arrived here in the United States.
In June, I was finally granted asylum after a long legal battle. After years of having argued for my deportation, ICE finally agreed to join me on my motion to reopen a deportation order issued more than 20 years ago. By reopening the case, the Board of Immigration Appeals effectively canceled the deportation order and allowed me to pursue asylum, which will provide the stability I need. The case wound its way back to the lower immigration court and, finally, last month, the immigration judge granted my asylum request.
I hope that ICE will now adopt broader policy reform ensuring more consistent treatment to protect stateless people, as I’m not alone. On June 12 my colleague at United Stateless wrote about another stateless man, Sergei, and his wife, Marina, who came here from the former Soviet Union. They’re still under threat of deportation by ICE, but there is no country that will accept them. Because ICE won't agree to lift that order and has not adopted a policy about statelessness, Sergei and Marina are not covered by new protections for stateless people, introduced last year by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They’re just two more examples of stateless people living under deportation orders who need to see this change happen.
In December 2021, Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security would "enhance protections" for stateless people. And USCIS has since done much to honor that. In October 2023, USCIS amended its policy manual to define statelessness. It now addresses the legal needs of stateless people by allowing USCIS officers to consider statelessness as a factor in decisions. USCIS also considered statelessness in updating processes for H-1B employment visas. And the agency has adopted policies that can assist certain stateless students, for example, by not requiring a waiver to stay in the United States where return to the country of origin is impossible. My colleagues have also engaged with USCIS representatives, who have shown willingness to open dialogue.
ICE, however, has not kept up. The agency has not adopted its own policy on statelessness, or even a legal definition of statelessness. Because of the deportation order, Sergei and Marina are under ICE’s jurisdiction, so they can't get protection under the new USCIS policy change; at least according to both ICE and USCIS interpretation. If ICE had a statelessness policy like USCIS does, or if it agreed to allow USCIS to have jurisdiction over stateless people under orders of deportation, it could allow people like Sergei and Marina access to protections.
If ICE enacts broader policy changes, which I hope it will now do, other stateless people will be able to clear up their status and move on with their lives.
Meanwhile I’m so grateful to my lawyers: David Bennion, executive director of the Free Migration Project, and Michelle Mendez, director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. I’m also very grateful to United Stateless, an organization I co-founded, and to Executive Director Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, who has been a stalwart advocate for my cause. There are countless others who have kept believing in my case, and in the cause of statelessness. I’m particularly grateful to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) for their reintroduction of the Stateless Protection Act, which would provide a permanent administrative fix for statelessness, so we don’t have to rely on conflicting subagency policies.
I firmly believe that by coming together as stateless people, telling our stories and advocating in our own interests, we have the power to overcome this human rights issue in America and around the world. The resolution of my case should give people hope that more is possible on statelessness, and I am determined to keep fighting for justice for people like me.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.