Joe Biden's open border let a terrorist group's private chef walk straight into America.
Two Obama and Biden judges then ruled his months cooking for terrorist leaders didn't count against him.
Now one judge's blistering dissent is forcing the Supreme Court to settle the question for good.
Fourth Circuit Judges Say Eight Thousand Meals for Terrorists Isn't Material Support
Izuchukwu Ozurumba crossed the southern border illegally in July 2023.
He surrendered to Border Patrol agents and asked for asylum.
Ozurumba admits he spent roughly six months cooking three meals a day for the leaders of Nigeria's Unknown Gunmen, a group an immigration judge found meets the federal definition of a Tier III terrorist organization.
He says he did it under armed guard and escaped during a grocery run.
The Immigration and Nationality Act bars anyone who provides "material support" to a terrorist group from getting asylum in America.
An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals both agreed Ozurumba's cooking crossed that line.
Then two judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw the ruling out.
Obama and Biden Appointees Decide Feeding Terrorists Doesn't Count
Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, wrote the majority opinion.
Judge Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee, signed onto it.
Together they decided that cooking thousands of meals for the group's leaders was not "material support" because the food itself couldn't be used to carry out an attack.
Judge Julius Richardson wasn't buying it.
"Ozurumba did not run a hot dog stand that the Unknown Gunmen happened to stop by once or twice," Richardson wrote in his dissent.
"Rather, he acted as a private chef, providing three meals a day for over a dozen leaders of a terrorist organization – for months."
Richardson understood what the majority refused to admit: feeding a terrorist army is helping it fight.
Legal fellow Bryce Poole of Advancing American Freedom laid out exactly why that matters.
"Because he's cooking the meals, one of the armed guards doesn't have to cook the meals and can be an armed guard," Poole told Fox News Digital.
"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."
Other Courts Already Got This Right and the Fourth Circuit Ignored Them
This isn't the first time a circuit court has faced this exact question.
In 2012, the Ninth Circuit ruled on a Sri Lankan man forcibly conscripted into the Tamil Tigers.
That court held duress doesn't excuse material support either – conscripted or not, helping a terrorist group still counts against you.
The Fourth Circuit's Ozurumba panel ignored that precedent and invented a new escape hatch instead – claiming that much food for terrorist commanders wasn't material in the first place.
Hans von Spakovsky of Advancing American Freedom said that dodge defies common sense.
"The idea that providing over 8,000 meals for the leaders of a terrorist organization and its members is not 'material' defies common sense," von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital.
He noted every other federal appeals court that has looked at the question has ruled the opposite way.
Here's what fires me up about this one: two judges picked by Obama and Biden looked at months of meals cooked for terrorist commanders and decided that's not help.
That's not an accident of legal reasoning – that's a judiciary trained for a generation to find any excuse, any technicality, any sympathetic backstory that keeps a deportation from happening.
The Supreme Court killed Chevron deference two years ago specifically so activist judges and unelected bureaucrats stop rewriting laws Congress already wrote plainly.
Congress said material support bars asylum, full stop – no carve out for duress, no carve out for a sympathetic job title like "cook."
Now the justices have to decide whether that law still means what it says, or whether circuit judges get to keep inventing new exceptions every time a sympathetic plaintiff shows up in their courtroom.
If the Fourth Circuit's logic survives, every terrorist group's driver, radio operator, and launderer gets the same new legal argument: I wasn't pulling the trigger, so deport somebody else.
Trump's Justice Department is right to fight this all the way to the top, and the fact that it even has to prove months of feeding terrorist commanders counted as help proves how far off the rails asylum law drifted under years of Biden-appointed judges waving people through.
Sources:
- Elaine Mallon, "Can Cooking For Terrorists Bar Asylum? Supreme Court Takes Up Unusual Case With Broader Immigration Stakes," Fox News, October 15, 2026.
- Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Ozurumba v. Bondi opinion, September 2025.
- Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Annachamy v. Holder opinion, July 3, 2012.
