Opinion of the Court
ed., Supp. III). According to the Government, that predecessor provision was jurisdictional, and Congress merely carried forward that understanding in §1252(d)(1). But at each step of that theory, we find doubt, not clarity.
To begin, the Government has not established that the predecessor provision was actually jurisdictional. Its text, standing alone, did not clearly govern the court’s jurisdiction. So the Government turns to precedent. No precedent of this Court, however, established that the predecessor exhaustion provision was jurisdictional (in the sense that we now use the term).
The Government principally invokes Stone v. INS, 514 U. S. 386 (1995), and Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418 (2009). Both cases described portions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that contained §1252(d)(1)’s predecessor as “jurisdictional.” Stone, 514 U. S., at 399, 405; Nken, 556 U. S., at 424. But “[j]urisdiction, the Court has observed, is a word of many, too many, meanings,” and courts “have more than occasionally” used it to describe rules beyond those governing a court’s adjudicatory authority. Fort Bend County, 587 U. S., at ___–___, and n. 4 (slip op., at 5–6, and n. 4) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Neither Stone nor Nken attends to the distinction between “jurisdictional” rules (as we understand them today) and nonjurisdictional but mandatory ones. Indeed, Stone predates our cases, starting principally with Arbaugh in 2006, that “bring some discipline to the use of th[e] term” “jurisdictional.” Henderson, 562 U. S., at 435. Nken came later, but it never addressed the Arbaugh line of cases. And in both Stone and Nken, whether the provisions were jurisdictional “was not central to the case.” Reed Elsevier, 559 U. S., at 161. On top of all that, neither case addressed the exhaustion requirement specifically. Instead, both merely mentioned the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that housed the exhaustion requirement. Stone, 514 U. S., at 399, 405; Nken, 556 U. S., at 424. Stone and Nken
