The Supreme Court will decide if cooking thousands of meals for terrorist leaders bars asylum, a case testing the reach of national security limits on immigration.
Fox News Digital reported that the justices agreed Tuesday to hear the Trump administration’s challenge to a Fourth Circuit ruling that overturned a deportation order against Nigerian citizen Izuchukwu Ozurumba. He prepared three meals a day for leaders of a militant group known as the Unknown Gunmen before seeking asylum in the United States.
The administration argues that ordinary services can sustain terrorist organizations and trigger the material-support bar in the Immigration and Nationality Act. That federal rule denies asylum to anyone who gave material help to terrorists. Congress listed examples such as transportation, communications, housing, money, weapons, and training, but it did not spell out every form of aid.
Ozurumba crossed the southern border without valid entry documents in July 2023 during the Biden administration and surrendered to Border Patrol. An immigration judge later denied his asylum claim and ordered him removed. The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that decision. A divided Fourth Circuit panel then reversed it and sent the case back.
Ozurumba said he first agreed to work as a chef at a rural camp and later learned it belonged to the Unknown Gunmen, a militant group linked to political violence in Nigeria. He prepared three meals a day for 15 to 17 leaders for roughly six months, including three months without pay. He described the arrangement as forced under threat of violence.
He escaped during a grocery trip. He said group members kept threatening and attacking him afterward. He fled Nigeria, traveled through Venezuela, and reached the U.S. border. The immigration judge found the Unknown Gunmen qualified as a Tier III terrorist organization under federal immigration law even though the State Department had not formally designated the group. Tier III covers organizations that use violence for political ends.
Ozurumba was deported to Nigeria in April 2025 while his appeal was still pending. The Fourth Circuit had already declined to order the government to bring him back. A Supreme Court win for the administration would not automatically grant him asylum or guarantee his return.
Judges James Wynn Jr., an Obama appointee, and Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee, formed the majority. They held that although Ozurumba prepared thousands of meals for the group’s leaders, his cooking did not supply resources that could be directly used or readily redirected toward terrorist operations. The panel overturned the deportation order on a 2-1 vote and remanded the matter to the Board of Immigration Appeals. It left the duress question unresolved.
Judge Julius Richardson dissented. He rejected the idea that the help was minor or incidental.
Richardson wrote:
"Ozurumba did not run a hot dog stand that the Unknown Gunmen happened to stop by once or twice. Rather, he acted as a private chef, providing three meals a day for over a dozen leaders of a terrorist organization, for months."
That dissent tracks the statute’s broad language and the practical reality of how armed groups operate.
Bryce Poole, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital the dispute reaches beyond one cook.
Poole said:
"The biggest takeaway is that this is a case about who gets to draw the line on a law that affects national security. Congress wrote a broad rule, and the court interpreted it narrowly."
He explained the fungible nature of the support. Because Ozurumba cooked, an armed guard did not have to leave his post to prepare food. The same logic applies to a bomb maker who can keep working instead of stopping to make meals.
Poole added:
"That's one guard who doesn't have to come in off guard duty to cook meals, or that's one bomb maker who doesn't have to stop making bombs to go cook meals, because all this stuff is fungible."
Hans von Spakovsky, a legal expert at the same organization, called the majority’s reading a break from common sense and from other courts. He noted the volume of food involved and pointed to long-standing military reality.
Von Spakovsky said:
"The idea that providing over 8,000 meals for the leaders of a terrorist organization and its members is not 'material' defies common sense. Richardson correctly cites Napoleon’s famous quote that an 'army marches on its stomach.'"
He stressed that other federal appeals courts have treated food and shelter as material support even when the aid is not tied to a specific attack. He also noted that duress, even if proven, does not create an excuse under the statute to avoid removal.
Von Spakovsky stated:
"Other federal appeals courts have all held that providing food and shelter, even if unconnected to a specific terrorist event, constitutes material support within the statute. And doing so under duress, even if true, is not an excuse under the statute to avoid removal."
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to restore the broader reading of the material-support bar. After the Court overturned Chevron deference in 2024, judges no longer owe automatic weight to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. That shift puts the statutory text and Congress’s national-security purpose front and center.
Ozurumba’s own account describes sustained daily service to the leadership of a group the immigration judge classified as a Tier III terrorist organization. He cooked for months. He fed more than a dozen leaders three times a day. The Fourth Circuit majority still found the aid insufficient to count as material support.
That outcome collides with the text Congress wrote and with the decisions of other circuits. It also collides with basic incentives: every meal prepared by an outsider is a meal a fighter or bomb maker does not have to prepare himself.
The justices now have the chance to say whether the material-support bar still means what it says when the help comes in the form of a full-time kitchen rather than a suitcase of cash or a crate of weapons.
Americans expect the law that blocks aid to terrorists to cover the logistics that keep those groups fed and free to operate. Courts should not invent exceptions that Congress never wrote.
