In her 1951 landmark study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterized statelessness as “the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history,” one which has much to do with explaining the book’s titular subject. Roughly a century after the post-World War I period to which Arendt was referring, mass migration and displacement are again leading to ominous political developments. The Trump administration’s recent actions on immigration provide a clear case in point. Since Trump retook office in January, we’ve witnessed the aggressive deployment and expansion of an immigration enforcement apparatus empowered to deport non-citizens without due process, arrest them for speech acts, and confine them in a mushrooming system of detention facilities and internment camps. I want to consider these developments in light of four Arendtian theses drawn from her freshly resonant analysis of “the refugee problem” in Origins, Chapter 9. For simplicity’s sake, I will apply Arendt’s term “stateless” broadly to non-citizens of various stripes whose standing in this country has become precarious, even if they are not in all cases stateless in a technical sense. That is the term Arendt herself most often uses, though her discussion extends beyond technical statelessness to encompass refugees, the persecuted, and the displaced, suggesting a broader application of the concept. As Ayten Gündoğdu shows, moreover, in her excellent 2015 book, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, despite the developments in human rights protections since the publication of Origins, Arendt’s analysis of statelessness is to a remarkable extent still applicable.
Thesis #1: The stateless lack the most fundamental right: the right to have rights
“We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights…and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296-297).
It is tempting to assume that all people must have fundamental rights just by virtue of being human, especially when seminal documents like the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen define them as God-given or “natural, inalienable, and sacred.” Against this temptation, Arendt argues that the plight of the stateless in the post-WWI period gave the lie to the notion of human rights—the only rights are those respected by particular states. If no state deigns to guarantee rights to an individual, then they are without rights, without even, in Arendt’s famous formulation, “the right to have rights.”
Take the much-publicized case of Kilmar Ábrego García, arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and deported without trial to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, his country of origin. Despite admitting that he had been deported in error—Ábrego García had previously been granted “withholding of removal” status based on a “clear probability of future persecution” if returned to El Salvador—the Trump administration initially renounced any further responsibility on the grounds that he was no longer in American jurisdiction, chillingly implying the ability to disappear individuals with impunity. From an Arendtian perspective, what became apparent was that Ábrego García lacked even the right to have any rights respected at all. He was eventually brought back to the United States under pressure from the courts, which provide for now, at least, some check on the runaway executive. Upon return, however, he was immediately indicted for alleged human smuggling—a charge he denies—and the threat of another summary deportation looms as he awaits his uncertain fate.
To the extent that they lack a state to recognize and protect their rights (something that surely admits of degree), Ábrego García and others like him are subject to arrest, deportation, imprisonment, and perhaps even disappearance with only tenuous protection of law.
Thesis #2: The internment camp becomes the “solution” for the problem of the stateless
“[T]he internment camp—prior to the second World War the exception rather than the rule for the stateless—has become the routine solution for the problem of domicile of the ‘displaced persons’” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 279).
Of course, there are other solutions. Naturalization is one, but Arendt says that this avenue breaks down—on logistical grounds—when it becomes a matter of dealing not with a few exceptional cases (as had been the pre-WWI norm), but with mass applications for naturalization. Whatever the logistical challenges, this gambit certainly fails when a government (and a society, more broadly) decides that it simply does not want to pursue the path of naturalization for broad categories of would-be citizens, as ours has done.
The next solution is deportation, which is being aggressively pursued—the administration aims for one million deportations per year—but some countries do not accept deportees, and in other cases, legal challenges delay the process. The other “solution” in this case—for those whose deportation is pending—is the internment camp, a place outside the reach of the law for holding those denied its protection.
There are currently about 60,000 people being held in ICE detention facilities in this country. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has allocated an unprecedented $45 billion dollars for the expansion of this internment apparatus, providing for a doubling in the number of beds available, as well as the creation of new facilities, such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades.
If we might once have been accustomed to associate such camps with the excesses of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and other “axes of evil,” but not with ourselves, naively writing off the WWII internment of Japanese and Guantánamo as aberrations, it is no longer possible to maintain this fiction.
Thesis #3: To be stateless is to be deprived of speech and action
“The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296).
In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies action as one of three fundamental human activities alongside work and labor, which together constitute the “vita activa.” Action corresponds to the human capacity to begin something new, to set off new chains of events that could not have been predicted from what came before. Unlike work and labor, actions have as their end the performance of the action itself. This is because in acting, we disclose who we are as individuals. This disclosure happens often—or even mostly—through speech. Because action is disclosure, it requires the presence, and recognition, of others. We become who we are through our actions (and words), but we can only be somebody if we are who we are for others. Arendt thought that political communities emerged to provide a “space of appearance” wherein human beings can appear to each other and receive recognition from each other, thereby conditioning self-realization.
By this logic, deprived of belonging in a political community, the stateless lack the recognition and status that make action and speech possible. For those stateless who live in fear of drawing attention to themselves because the surrounding community rejects the legitimacy of their presence, and for those already interned in camps, there is a kind of de facto deprivation of action and speech. Whether there out of fear or by force, they reside in the shadows, invisible, inaudible.
Those who do attempt to act and speak, on the other hand, are subject to being silenced, as we see in the case of non-citizen student activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University, was active as a spokesperson and negotiator in the pro-Palestine protests there in 2023–24. Despite being a green card holder never charged with a crime, he was arrested on March 8, 2025 by ICE agents on the grounds that his presence might have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he remained for three months before his detention was ruled unconstitutional. In a similar case, Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University on an F-1 student visa spent six weeks in an ICE facility before a court ordered her release. The reason for her arrest by six masked, plainclothes ICE officers while she was waiting to meet friends for dinner appears to have been an op-ed she co-wrote in The Tufts Daily a year prior, calling on Tufts to divest from companies with Israel ties and acknowledge the genocide in Gaza.
It is surely no coincidence that these students were imprisoned for speaking out on behalf of Palestinians, the most prominent stateless population today, whose tragic plight provides illustration of the Arendtian theses outlined here perhaps even more clearly than the case under discussion.
Thesis #4: Statelessness is an origin of totalitarianism
“One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 278).
“The greater the ratio of stateless and potentially stateless to the population at large…the greater the danger of a gradual transformation into a police state” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 287-288).
Statelessness is not, of course, itself totalitarian, nor does it lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Arendt warns against “the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’.” Instead, statelessness is one “element” (a term Arendt later substituted for “origin”) among others that can contribute to the development of totalitarianism. Roughly, it works as follows: in direct proportion to the numbers of people a society declines to recognize as legitimate, who exist (in Arendt’s phrase) “outside the pale of the law,” a police force is empowered to work itself outside the bounds of law in controlling them. Hence, ICE agents are wont to drive unmarked cars, wear plain clothes, and hide their faces in masks. Unlike other cops, they often do not show a badge when making arrests, and their detainees often receive scant due process. Despite or, probably more accurately, because of these features, this is an agency currently slated for massive growth. The aforementioned “beautiful bill” allocates $30 billion for ICE enforcement activities, allowing it to hire up to 10,000 additional officers and making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
Arendt articulates the danger in all of this as follows:
“The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 290).
We might amend the first part of this to read: “The clearer the proof of their ability to treat stateless people as illegal persons…”; otherwise, it rings like an alarm. President Trump has mused publicly about deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvadorean prisons like CECOT, where Ábrego García was sent, portending a time when U.S. citizens are in a predicament similar to that of their non-citizen counterparts outlined above. That is to say: a time when citizens, too, have to fight for their fundamental right to have rights; when internment is the “solution” for citizen no less than non-citizen undesirables; and when action and speech are risks for all in common. In this event, the “totalitarian infection” will have become serious indeed, and Arendt’s 1951 study even more applicable.
Matthew Homan
Matthew Homan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA. He is the author of Spinoza’s Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), as well as numerous other publications on the early modern rationalists, especially Spinoza and Descartes. He teaches a wide range of classes, including a summer study abroad course to Germany on totalitarianism that uses Arendt as a critical guide.
