On Tuesday, the Supreme Court added Blanche v. Ozurumba, a case on whether someone who worked as a cook for a terrorist organization is eligible for asylum protections, to its oral argument docket for the 2026-27 term. Even before that grant, however, the docket was dominated by immigration issues.
Since late April, the court has granted review in seven immigration-related cases. One of those was dismissed as moot (that is, no longer a live controversy) last month, but, including Ozurumba, six remain, meaning that around one-fifth of the cases currently on the oral argument docket involve immigration. What’s more, the justices will soon consider several more high-profile petitions for review in this area, including one that covers the same essential ground as the case dismissed last month.
As I reported last year, it’s not unusual for the justices to hear multiple immigration cases in a single term, because both Republican and Democratic administrations routinely spar with noncitizens and immigrants’ rights groups about how to interpret and apply federal immigration law. However, the second Trump administration’s heightened focus on immigration issues – and reinterpretation of certain detention and deportation policies – has fueled a surge in immigration lawsuits at all levels of the legal system, which explains why the 2026-27 docket has a particularly high number of immigration disputes (that may grow even higher).
Here’s a brief overview of the immigration-related cases already on the oral argument docket, as well as a few pending petitions that may be worth watching.
Third-country removals
Perhaps the highest-profile immigration case set for oral argument this term is Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., a challenge by a group of immigrants to the Trump administration’s practice of deporting noncitizens to countries not identified in their removal orders – a process known as “third-country removals.”
This issue arrived on the oral argument docket via the interim docket, where it has been addressed by the court three times over the past 17 months. The Trump administration first asked the justices to clear the way for third-country removals to continue in May 2025, after a federal judge in Massachusetts barred the government from deporting noncitizens to third-party countries without first providing them with, among other things, a written notice of where they would be sent and an opportunity to raise their concerns about facing torture there. In June 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to put that order on hold. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
One day after the court issued that decision, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer returned to the interim docket, asking the justices to allow the administration to remove a group of immigrants being held on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to South Sudan, a move that had been blocked by the same federal judge. On July 3, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s motion for clarification, explaining that its June order allowed the deportations to South Sudan. Sotomayor and Jackson again dissented. Kagan wrote a concurring opinion, reiterating her opposition to the court’s June decision but adding that she did “not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”
Last month, after the federal judge in Massachusetts issued a final judgment blocking its third-country removal policy, the Trump administration brought the issue back to the interim docket yet again, asking the justices to put the new decision on hold. On Sept. 29, the court – over objections from Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson – agreed to temporarily pause the lower court’s ruling. However, it also took up the dispute for oral argument in December. The justices asked the litigants to brief several questions, including whether the administration’s third-country removal policy is unlawful.
Access to bond hearings
Another closely watched case on the Trump administration’s approach to deportations is Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha. It addresses the administration’s policy of detaining noncitizens who have been apprehended within the United States under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), a section of federal immigration law that mandates detention of applicants for admission into the country who are “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted” and does not provide for bond hearings.
Past administrations have applied Section 1225 only to noncitizens who were apprehended crossing the border or soon after they entered the country; noncitizens who were apprehended within the U.S. years or decades after they arrived in the country had been detained under a different statute, Section 1226, which does authorize bond hearings or conditional parole. By shifting to Section 1225 detentions, the Trump administration has sought to detain noncitizens apprehended within the country without bond while they await removal proceedings.
In recent months, judges across the country have delivered thousands of rulings against these detentions, and most federal appeals courts to address the issue have decided that Section 1225 does not apply to noncitizens apprehended within the country. On Oct. 1, the justices took up Rhoney, agreeing to clarify the scope of Section 1225.
Genalo v. Black, the case that was dismissed from the oral argument docket last month, also addressed access to bond hearings. Specifically, it asked whether immigrants detained under a law targeting noncitizens who commit certain crimes have a due process right to a bond hearing once their detention becomes “unreasonably prolonged.” The Trump administration had also asked the justices to determine what the government must show to justify continued detention if such a hearing is indeed required.
The case was dismissed after Sauer notified the court that the administration agreed with the immigrant, Keisy G.M., that the case no longer presented a live controversy because he had been pardoned by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and was therefore no longer eligible to be detained under the law at issue. In his letter requesting dismissal, Sauer said that the Justice Department aimed to soon bring a new case presenting the same questions to the court so that the justices could still answer them during the 2026-27 term. (More on that later.)
Asylum issues
As noted above, the justices granted review on Tuesday in Blanche v. Ozurumba, agreeing to clarify what type of support an immigrant must have provided to a terrorist organization to be ineligible for various immigration benefits, including asylum protections.
The case involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, a Nigerian man who worked as a cook in a camp run by a separatist organization called the “Unknown Gunmen” “for about six months” before escaping, according to the government’s petition. He traveled to Venezuela and then to the United States, where he applied for asylum, but an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals concluded that his work in the camp amounted to “material support” for terrorism and that he was, therefore, ineligible for asylum and subject to removal under a provision of federal law that deems anyone who provides “material support” for a “terrorist organization” ineligible for a visa or entrance into the United States.
Ozurumba appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which agreed with him that his work as a cook in the camp did not represent “material support” for a terrorist organization. “Cooking meals using food and supplies purchased by the organization may have ‘sustained’ the organization in the broadest possible sense … but provided nothing that the organization could use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities,” concluded Judge James Wynn in the majority opinion. The Supreme Court will now review the 4th Circuit’s ruling.
Asylum policy is also at the center of Wassily v. Blanche, which is set to be argued on Nov. 30. The case asks whether a noncitizen whose asylum protections have been terminated remains eligible to become a lawful permanent resident, also known as a green card holder.
Wassily was appealed to the Supreme Court by two men who lost their asylum protections after being convicted of multiple crimes. They assert that they remain eligible for adjustment to a green card, because the text of the law addressing such adjustments refers only to someone who has been “granted asylum” and does not explicitly address what is to happen if this grant is later terminated.
In the government’s response to the petition, Sauer did not oppose Supreme Court review. He defended the lower court’s decision, arguing that it was correct when it held that immigration law “allows only noncitizens with current asylum status to adjust to lawful permanent resident status.” But, after highlighting a conflict between the federal courts of appeals on the issue, Sauer described the case as a “suitable” one with which to resolve “the disagreement on an important and recurring legal question.”
In an August column for SCOTUSblog, Duncan Fulton contended that “Wassily is of considerable significance,” because “recent policy changes by the Trump administration have” put more asylum beneficiaries at risk of losing their asylum protections. And columnist César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández recently wrote that the case “highlights the tension between a law enacted half a century ago that seems to let people who had been granted asylum, only to lose it later, obtain a green card despite a conviction for a long list of crimes, and today’s prevailing political sentiment that can’t contemplate doing anything of the sort.”
Other immigration-related cases
The justices will also hear argument in two cases that stem from immigration disputes but don’t raise what we would typically think of as immigration questions.
The first, Department of Labor v. Sun Valley Orchards, addresses the H-2A program, which enables U.S. employers “to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs.” The justices agreed to decide whether the Department of Labor has the power to hold hearings to collect money from employers who violate the terms of this visa program.
The second, Montoya Palacios v. Liggins, asks whether a habeas petition challenging civil immigration detention qualifies as a “civil action” under the Equal Access to Justice Act. If it does, a detainee who prevails in such a case could be eligible for attorney’s fees if the government’s position was not “substantially justified.”
Notable pending petitions
In the coming weeks and months, the justices will have several more opportunities to add immigration-related cases to the oral argument docket, when it weighs petitions for review addressing other aspects of the Trump administration’s policies on asylum, immigration detention, and deportation.
- Genalo v. D.C. is the Trump administration’s substitute for Genalo v. Black. Notably, Sauer is asking the Supreme Court to take up this dispute before the federal appeals court weighs in. He emphasizes that the justices have taken this approach in the past to “to allow a case to replace one that was dismissed.”
- Mullin v. Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services asks whether the federal government may remove immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally without first giving them a chance to seek asylum and whether the lower courts properly allowed the challenge to speedy removals to move forward as a class action. This petition for review is scheduled to be considered by the justices at their private conference on Nov. 6.
- Trump v. Suri addresses whether district courts have the authority to hear claims brought by a noncitizen challenging the validity of his detention while he awaits removal proceedings. The Trump administration contends that federal immigration law “channels all challenges that go to the validity of an alien’s removal” to the federal courts of appeals, and “strips district courts of jurisdiction over nearly all claims ‘arising from’ removal proceedings.” The case involves scholar Badar Khan Suri at Georgetown University, who was detained amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists. (Another pro-Palestinian activist, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, is expected to file a petition for review by Oct. 19 raising the same question about district court jurisdiction.)
A petition typically needs to be granted by late January to make it onto the oral argument docket for the current term. And even if none of these pending petitions are taken up for argument, the 2026-27 term will likely be remembered for its immigration-related rulings.
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