Statelessness doesn’t tend to top the list of everyday worries—unless, apparently, your entire life ends up caught in the machinery of international paperwork with a suddenness that borders on Kafkaesque. The experience of Jermaine Thomas, described in a comprehensive CNN report, is just that: a uniquely modern administrative oddity, full of peculiar legal cul-de-sacs and the sort of bureaucratic loopholes that seem tailor-made for archivists to puzzle over.
Born Under a Flag, Deported Under None
Thomas’s story is the sort of scenario officials drafting citizenship law probably didn’t imagine playing out in a real person’s life. According to immigration records, Thomas was born in 1986 at a US military hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, to a Kenyan-born mother and a father who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen two years earlier. The details, examined by CNN through military and immigration paperwork, paint a picture of a family moving confidently along the well-trodden path of American military families: after his birth in Germany, they returned stateside with Jermaine as a toddler.
Except somewhere in the administrative shuffle, a visa form registered Jermaine’s nationality as Jamaican—a detail family members admitted to CNN they never noticed at the time. In their recollection, there was “never a question” he was American, and his father, a military helicopter mechanic, handled all of young Jermaine’s paperwork. Life moved forward accordingly: Thomas grew up in Florida and Virginia, lived his adult life in Texas, and until well into adulthood, never doubted his American-ness.
But, as officials told CNN, history’s full of fine-print quirks. US law doesn’t recognize birth on a foreign military base as “in the United States” for citizenship purposes. Court filings reviewed by CNN show the military hospital in Germany failed to qualify him, and an even smaller wrinkle clinched his fate: his father, though an American by law, was one year shy of the required ten years’ physical presence in the US needed to automatically transfer citizenship to a child born abroad. Nine years (including military service) didn’t make the cut.
When Thomas’s legal team tried to cite presidential candidate John McCain—a comparison noted in the Supreme Court filings reviewed by CNN—the government drew a line between McCain’s birth in the US-controlled Panama Canal Zone and Thomas’s in Germany, arguing only the former counted as “sovereign US territory.” The difference, apparently, is measured in bureaucratic square footage.
A Life Fully American—Except on Paper
The real-world impact of these obscure rules left Thomas occupying a liminal space that seems equal parts legal filing and existential puzzle. Officials confirmed to CNN that after returning to the US as a child in 1989, Thomas spent much of his life working odd jobs across Florida, Virginia, and Texas. He accumulated a criminal record stretching back to 2006: convictions detailed in Texas Department of Public Safety records included drug possession, robbery, theft, a 2011 misdemeanor domestic violence charge for which he served 30 days, and more recently a prison term for driving while intoxicated and harassment of a public servant.
A relative, concerned about “retaliation” from immigration authorities and therefore unnamed, characterized his legal troubles to CNN as “a lot of wrong choices” made worse by years of untreated mental illness—Thomas has schizoaffective disorder, according to medical documents reviewed by the outlet. Thomas himself admitted to CNN, “I was put in situations in life where, you know, your hand’s forced to survive one way or another.” He took psychiatric medication in the US, but says that after his deportation, his supply is almost gone.
In February, after an eviction in Killeen, Texas—documented by police records cited in CNN—he was arrested for criminal trespass after checking on possessions left curbside. He pleaded no contest and served a short sentence, telling CNN that his public defender recommended the plea to avoid months in jail awaiting trial. When released, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked him up and transferred him to an immigration detention facility—a process Thomas described as confusing and anxiety-inducing. He recalled to CNN being assured by a detention supervisor that he wasn’t facing deportation before being placed on a van and then a plane to Jamaica, surrounded by US Marshals.
For the record, the Department of Homeland Security described Thomas differently. In a statement quoted by CNN, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Thomas was “a violent, criminal illegal alien from Jamaica” with “nearly two decades posing a significant threat to public safety.” The agency asserted, “Dangerous criminal aliens like Mr. Thomas have no place in American communities.”
It’s a dramatic difference in perspective: on one hand, a stateless man with mental illness, no ties to Jamaica, and a family insisting he’s “not violent”; on the other, paperwork defining him chiefly as someone to be removed.
“What Are You Supposed To Do When You’re Stateless?”
This is where the real-world effects of bureaucratic oddity get awfully sharp-edged. Thomas told CNN he doesn’t have legal status in any country: not Germany (where citizenship isn’t conferred by birth alone), not Jamaica (which requires an application and isn’t automatic for those born abroad), not Kenya (where only fathers can pass down citizenship under local law), and, obviously, not the US. Letter correspondence reviewed by CNN confirms Jamaica doesn’t recognize him as a citizen without further steps.
Betsy Fisher, a refugee law lecturer at the University of Michigan Law School, pointed out to CNN that while the US has an estimated 200,000 stateless people, cases like Thomas’s—someone living in the US from childhood, neither German, Jamaican, nor Kenyan, and ultimately deported—are vanishingly rare. She explained that the US isn’t party to international conventions protecting stateless persons, leaving few legal safeguards. Historically, the US didn’t deport people unless the destination country claimed them. But, she noted, enforcement priorities have changed, and deportation to countries where the recipient has no status is now a grudgingly acknowledged “recent phenomenon.”
“Who’s ever even really heard of such a thing?” Thomas wondered when interviewed by CNN. “What are you supposed to do when you’re stateless?”
Bureaucracy, Bizarrely Human
For now, Thomas’s life is a case study in unresolved paperwork. He sleeps in a noisy, crowded Kingston shelter, adrift in a country where, as he described to CNN, the language barrier (Jamaican Patois) leaves him feeling isolated, and he lacks ID or legal right to work. The Jamaican Ministry of National Security briefly put him in a hotel, but he now describes himself as “hungry, completely exhausted, on constant alert.”
His family, cited throughout CNN’s reporting, is left in a parallel limbo—missing him, but fearful to visit since travel could mean being locked out of the US themselves. “It’s like I’ve lost him forever,” a relative confessed to the network. The surreal outcome: a man, born to a US Army father in a US military hospital, treated by the law as if he never belonged anywhere at all.
Fine Print and Fallout
Legal filings reviewed by CNN make it painfully clear: Thomas missed US citizenship by a hair’s breadth—a single year on his father’s record, a base that didn’t count. Betsy Fisher called his fate “like a life sentence,” describing the “fringe” existence he now faces with no ability to work, settle, or return to the US.
Attempts to pass protections for stateless people stateside have stalled; as Fisher told CNN, “We’re really moving backwards on this issue.” Congressional action, she said, could easily resolve these rare but costly cases—but motivation, as usual, remains elusive.
What does it say about bureaucracy that a man can be wholly assimilated into a country for almost four decades, only to be removed on a technicality of geography and military leave records? How many more live in similar in-between spaces, where a missing stamp or ill-placed tick box holds more weight than childhood memories or lived experience? For the rest of us, it’s simply another note to mark in the sprawling archive of America’s paperwork oddities—a reminder that “almost American” is sometimes the most precarious status of all.