Wednesday, July 9, 2025 - A 39-year-old man with Kenyan roots has been left stateless after being deported to Jamaica under the Trump-era immigration crackdown, despite having never set foot in the country.
Jermaine Thomas, born in 1986 at a U.S. military hospital in
Frankfurt, Germany, to a Kenyan mother and an American father, was deported
earlier this year.
Though raised in the U.S. from the age of three, Thomas only
discovered in his 20s that he was not considered a U.S. citizen.
His troubles began after a 2008 drug possession arrest,
where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flagged his immigration status.
Despite his father's American citizenship, legal
technicalities emerged - his father had only been a citizen for nine years at
Thomas’s birth, not the required ten to confer citizenship to children born
abroad.
Although Thomas arrived in the U.S. as a legal resident,
Homeland Security later classified him as a Jamaican citizen - though he never
held Jamaican citizenship, nor did he qualify for German or Kenyan citizenship
under each country’s laws.
Kenya, for example, only allows citizenship through the
father in such cases.
Following a 2016 court ruling that he was not a U.S.
citizen, Thomas continued to live in the U.S. until a February 2024 arrest for
trespassing led to ICE detaining and deporting him.
He now lives in Kingston, Jamaica, in a shelter, far from
his family.
“What are you supposed to do when you’re stateless?” he told
CNN.
“This can’t really be happening.”
The Kenyan DAILY POST
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