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SANTOS-ZACARIA v. GARLAND

Opinion of the Court

therefore cannot be read to establish the predecessor exhaustion requirement as jurisdictional.

The Government also points to pre-Arbaugh decisions by lower courts characterizing the predecessor exhaustion provision as jurisdictional. Brief for Respondent 21, n. 6 (collecting cases). We have held, however, that pre-Arbaugh lower court cases interpreting a related provision are not enough to make clear that a rule is jurisdictional. MOAC Mall Holdings LLC v. Transform Holdco LLC, 598 U. S. ___, ___ (2023) (slip op., at 14); Wilkins, 598 U. S., at 165; Boechler, 596 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7–8); Reed Elsevier, 559 U. S., at 167–169.

Further weakening the Government’s reliance on the claimed jurisdictional status of §1252(d)(1)’s predecessor is the fact that when it enacted §1252(d)(1), Congress did not even recodify that prior provision exactly. Instead, Congress altered the formulation that, according to the Government, had been understood as a jurisdictional rule. Compare 8 U. S. C. §1105a(c) (1958 ed., Supp. III) (a deportation order “shall not be reviewed by any court if”) with 8 U. S. C. §1252(d)(1) (1994 ed., Supp. II) (“[a] court may review a final order of removal only if”). And having gone to the trouble of rewriting the provision, Congress still chose not to use the more expressly jurisdictional formulation that it utilized elsewhere. Supra, at 6–7. All of this is inconsistent with the Government’s theory that Congress understood the predecessor provision to be jurisdictional and carried that forward in §1252(d)(1).

Finally, the Government suggests that §1252(d)(1) is jurisdictional simply because it falls within §1252. Section 1252 is the exclusive source of jurisdiction for immigration cases like this one, the Government contends, so each of §1252’s limits must be jurisdictional. Brief for Respondent 17–18.[1] This logical leap falls short. Any foreclosure of


  1. For the proposition that §1252 is the exclusive source of jurisdiction,