Ordered deported in May 2001 because of his crime, Mr. Jama fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in January that he could indeed be returned to the violent and chaotic land of his birth despite its lack of a functioning government. So the immigration service chartered a plane and paid a private security company to repatriate him in April. But when he arrived at a Somali airstrip, local officials rejected his papers and turned him away.

Now, after a pricey journey of 18,000 miles, Mr. Jama, 26, is back in this Minneapolis suburb, at the county jail where he began, a man without a country, longing to go home - whether to relatives in Minnesota or to strangers in Somalia.

"It doesn't matter where I go," he said in a jailhouse interview punctuated by sarcasm and a few sobs. "I don't have land. I don't have nothing. I just want to get out of jail. You could let me out in Iraq right now. I want to be free."

Mr. Jama's struggle against the system, while extraordinary, reflects one of the stickiest political and moral quandaries facing the immigration service: what to do with people who have no legal right to stay, yet no practical route out. Though he is among only a handful of Somalis who are jailed while awaiting expulsion, about 4,000 of his countrymen also face imminent deportation - most because of failure of their asylum applications - if the government can get them back home.

And the issue is hardly limited to Somalis. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, using data from the Department of Homeland Security, counted 1,225 immigrants from more than 100 countries in long-term detention, like Mr. Jama, as of March. Thousands more ordered deported live under parolelike supervision and could be expelled at any time.

"We call them lifers," said David Leopold, a Cleveland lawyer who is on the board of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "It's a serious problem, because there's nowhere to send them, and if there's nowhere to send them, they go into this strange limbo."

While some are from war zones like Somalia or Sudan, where there are no authorities to issue passports, most are from nations like Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea that lack full diplomatic relations with the United States. Others are citizens of Vietnam, Laos or China whose return has been rejected for unknown reasons. There are problems that are most particular - a stateless European born in a displaced-persons camp, an Ethiopian from territory now belonging to Eritrea - and there are Palestinians without a homeland.

"It can be very challenging removing people to these countries," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The American public thinks it's just putting a person on a plane and letting him go."

Laura Lichter, a lawyer in Denver who represents Somalis, Cambodians and others in similar straits, said the government's failure to remove Mr. Jama only bolstered the argument that he and others like him should not be sent home until the situation is more stable.

"This is kind of like they're sending you C.O.D. someplace: someone needs to sign off on you on the other side," Ms. Lichter said. "It's one thing for the government to say, 'Look, you don't belong here, you've been a rude guest, go home.' But the point is, you don't just throw people out on the street. And I don't think anybody's really come up with a solution for it."

Outraged at the botching of Mr. Jama's removal, a federal judge in Minneapolis, John R. Tunheim, ordered last month that he be released by May 23. Judge Tunheim urged the government to "slow down its rush to act, and take time to carefully and thoroughly plan a lawful and safe deportation for all Somali nationals subject to deportation."