Three Meals a Day

The Supreme Court on Tuesday 13 October agreed to hear Blanche v. Ozurumba, No. 25-1343, the case of a Nigerian man who cooked three meals a day for the leaders of a separatist group for about six months, the Court’s docket shows. The question is whether that counts as “material support” to a terrorist organization, which would bar him from asylum and withholding of removal. The Fourth Circuit said it did not. The government, which asked the Court to hear the case, says the statute makes no such distinction.

The question presented, taken from the Solicitor General’s petition, is whether support under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI) “must advance the organization’s actual commission of terrorism to qualify for that bar.” No argument date has been set.

What the statute says, and does not

An immigrant who has “engaged in a terrorist activity” is inadmissible and deportable, and ineligible for asylum and withholding of removal. The definition includes an act that the person knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support either “for the commission of terrorist activity” or “to a terrorist organization,” the petition explains. Congress listed examples, including “a safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit, false documentation or identification, weapons” and explosives, and training. Food is not on the list, and the Act does not define “material support.”

The Board of Immigration Appeals filled the gap in Matter of A-C-M- (2018): an act that has “a logical and reasonably foreseeable tendency to promote, sustain, or maintain the organization, even if only to a de minimis degree,” the petition says. That is a low bar. The statute pairs it with a discretionary waiver in 8 U.S.C. 1182(d)(3)(B)(i), which the executive branch has used for support given under duress or to a minimal degree, the petition adds.

The facts of the case

Izuchukwu Ozurumba, a Nigerian citizen, took a cooking job in 2022 at a camp about 45 minutes outside Lagos. He learned the camp belonged to a group called the Unknown Gunmen, which the petition describes as a separatist organization that sought to “kill people working for the government” and “cause destruction.” His job was to cook three meals a day for the camp’s 15 to 17 “bosses.” He told the immigration judge he worked there for five to six months in all, the last three without pay, and that he could not leave. He escaped, left Nigeria for Venezuela, and entered the United States in July 2023. An immigration judge and the Board found the group a terrorist organization and held that his cooking was material support. Ozurumba was removed to Nigeria in April 2025, after the Fourth Circuit denied an emergency stay.

What the Fourth Circuit held

On 2 September 2025, a divided panel vacated the removal order in a published opinion by Judge James Wynn, joined by Judge Nicole Berner. The panel read “material” to mean support that “can either be directly used to plan or carry out terrorist activities or can be readily diverted to such use.” Cooking, it held, “provided nothing that the organization could use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities.” It declined to decide whether the bar has an implied duress exception, calling that “an unanswered question of administrative law.” Its earlier precedent rejecting such an exception rested on Chevron deference, which the Supreme Court overruled in Loper Bright (2024), so the panel said it was unclear that the precedent survives.

Judge Julius Richardson dissented, writing that the majority had taken “a red pen to the material-support bar.” His reasoning was textual: the statute covers support both “for” terrorist activity and “to” the organization, and the majority’s test erases the second. “An organization acts through its members, and its members need to eat,” he wrote.

The split the government claims

The petition says the decision conflicts with the Second Circuit’s Hernandez v. Sessions (2018), which affirmed a material-support finding for “$100 packages of foodstuffs every three months for more than two years,” and with the Third Circuit’s Singh-Kaur v. Ashcroft (2004), which involved providing food and setting up tents. It also cites Seventh Circuit decisions holding that support can be material even when “confined to the nonterrorist activities of the organization.” It treats the Sixth Circuit’s Hosseini v. Nielsen (2018), on which the Fourth Circuit partly relied, as consistent with a broader reading in practice. These characterisations of the other circuits are the government’s.

Ozurumba’s lawyers, in a brief in opposition filed on 3 August, call it “a manufactured circuit split, conflating divergent outcomes on different facts with doctrinal conflict.” They argue that the few courts to interpret “material” have applied the same standard as the Fourth Circuit, and that “no federal court has adopted the government’s rule.” They also argue that the unresolved question of duress makes the case “not a clean vehicle.”

The petition says the bar must be applied “in thousands of immigration proceedings per year,” and that the Fourth Circuit’s test is “demanding yet opaque.” The brief in opposition answers that nearly a decade of decisions applying the same standard has caused no disruption. Which reading of the word “material” the statute supports is the argument the Court has now agreed to hear. The grant itself says nothing about how the justices will answer it.