Supreme Court To Consider Government's Power To Deport Terrorist Supporters

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Supreme Court justices will weigh arguments in a case involving a Nigerian man whom an immigration judge concluded materially supported a terrorist group by working as a cook.

Justices on Oct. 13 said they granted a petition for review from the Department of Justice to consider overturning a lower court verdict in the case.

No justices filed explanations for granting the petition or dissented from the move.

The case involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, a Nigerian national. According to court documents, Ozurumba was looking for work and asked everyone he knew for leads, which led to a tip about working as a cook at an acquaintance's workplace.

The acquaintance declined to answer questions about his employer, and Ozurumba was taken to what he described as a rural camp that was patrolled by armed security officers. Ozurumba remained in the camp even after ascertaining the camp was run by a separatist group that sought to kill people working for the government because, he said, there was no way for him to leave.

Ozurumba spent about six months there before running away from a gas station while on a grocery shopping trip for the camp. He later entered the United States as an illegal immigrant.

An immigration judge determined that Ozurumba had provided material support to a terrorist organization by cooking for the group's leaders for six months. The judge ordered him deported. The Board of Immigration Appeals did not disturb the decision.

Ozurumba appealed, arguing the support he lent was not material, and a split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit agreed.

"'Material support' is support that is sufficiently substantial standing alone to help the terrorist organization accomplish its terrorist activities," the government said.

"Ozurumba's contributions to the Unknown Gunmen do not meet that standard.

"Cooking meals using food and supplies purchased by the organization may have 'sustained' the organization in the broadest possible sense - by converting raw groceries into meals they enjoyed - but provided nothing that the organization could use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities. As far as the record shows, Ozurumba was simply a captive laborer whose work had nothing to do with those activities."

The government appealed to the Supreme Court. Lawyers said that the majority's reading of the law was wrong and conflicted with the Supreme Court's analysis in a 2010 decision.

"If allowed to stand, it will visit significant harm on the government's ability to remove, and deny immigration benefits to, aliens with ties to terrorism," the government said.

Attorneys representing Ozurumba had urged the nation's top court not to accept the case.

"The government's petition rests on a manufactured circuit split, conflating divergent outcomes on different facts with doctrinal conflict," they said in a brief.

"But contrary to the government's contention, the few courts that have interpreted the word 'material' have applied the same legal standard as the Fourth Circuit did here - support must be relevant and significant to terrorism to trigger the bar."