Supreme Court takes up DOGE documents fight and an asylum plea from a chef for terrorists

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a pair of appeals from President Donald Trump’s administration, including a case about the Department of Government Efficiency, the government-cutting entity once run by Elon Musk, and a dispute about a Nigerian man who was denied asylum because he once cooked meals for members of a terrorist organization.

The two cases are a reflection of Trump’s return to power last year, both his crackdown on immigration and his moves to slash government spending.

The DOGE case raises fundamental questions about the power and transparency of an entity that slashed agencies with unusual speed last year. A left-leaning watchdog, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued to gain access to those documents under a federal transparency law, and lower federal courts have ordered DOGE to produce information to help decide whether the law applies.

The asylum case centers on a Nigerian national who served as a cook for a separatist group carrying out terrorist attacks, a dispute that the Trump administration says could affect thousands of immigration cases annually.

What was happening at DOGE?

The Trump administration appealed lower court orders requiring DOGE to disclose records, arguing that separation of powers concerns should bar such “wide-ranging and intrusive discovery” demands from federal courts. Those orders, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court, would “perversely give respondent much of the information that it sought in its” request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act “before any court has held that FOIA applies.”

While DOGE has slipped from public view, it had a significant impact on the federal government – carrying out Trump’s promise of limiting the federal government. Central to the case is whether DOGE was exercising power on its own, which might make it subject to open records requests, or whether it was merely acting as an advisory body to the president, in which case it would likely be shielded from those requests.

The Trump administration, which the president frequently claims is the most transparent in history, has aggressively fought the case, describing DOGE as a “presidential advisory body” within the White House that is tasked “with providing recommendations” rather than making decisions.

Over the dissent of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court last year came down on the side of DOGE in an earlier stage of the case, requiring lower courts to narrow the scope of the material ordered in discovery. CREW withdrew its request for certain documents but lower courts allowed other requests to stand. Now, the Supreme Court will decide if the more pared down requests were proper.

The lower court ordered DOGE to provide all “directives” by its administrator to its employees, to disclose any plans to access classified information and a deposition by the head of DOGE, Amy Gleason.

Guns and butter

Izuchukwu Ozurumba, who entered the United States in 2023 and later claimed asylum, says he was forced to cook at a camp for the Unknown Gunmen in Nigeria until he escaped during a run for groceries and gas. An immigration judge denied his asylum claim under a federal law that bars sanctuary for any migrant who provided “material support” to a terrorist organization.

The Supreme Court has increasingly made immigration a central theme of its new term. It is already reviewing Trump’s push to deport migrants to countries they have no connection with and his administration’s mandatory detention policies.

“Providing meals to a terrorist organization’s members is no less a material form of support than providing gasoline for its vehicles,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the Trump administration’s top appellate attorney, told the Supreme Court in its appeal.

Ozurumba was deported to Nigeria in 2025.

The Trump administration told the justices the particulars of Ozurumba’s case don’t matter. The law, it argued, “does not distinguish between guns and butter.”

But the Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals focused on the word “material” in the law, finding that Ozurumba’s six-month stint cooking meals for the separatist group didn’t meet that threshold. Ozurumba’s lawyers said their client didn’t realize what he was getting into when he sought the job and then was forced to continue to perform it against his will.

“Under the government’s reading, seemingly any interaction with a terrorist organization could be characterized as material support,” his attorneys said. A priest who hears confession to all comers, they argue, would be viewed as providing spiritual counsel. A doctor who treats a patient affiliated with a terrorist organization, they argue, could also be punished.

“Under such a test, ‘material’ loses all meaning – every conceivable form of support, no matter how attenuated, compelled, or incidental, would suffice,” they told the justices.

Decisions in both cases are expected by next summer.

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