Opinion of the Court
the opposite: If exhaustion is jurisdictional, litigants must slog through preliminary nonjudicial proceedings even when, for example, no party demands it or a court finds it would be pointless, wasteful, or too slow. Similarly, an exhaustion objection raised late in litigation (as jurisdictional objections can be) might derail “many months of work on the part of the attorneys and the court.” Henderson, 562 U. S., at 434–435 (jurisdictional rules risk “the waste of judicial resources and may unfairly prejudice litigants”). Thus, jurisdictional treatment could disserve the very interest in efficiency that exhaustion ordinarily advances. See Wilkins, 598 U. S., at 158 (“Given th[e] risk of disruption and waste that accompanies the jurisdictional label, courts will not lightly apply it to procedures Congress enacted to keep things running smoothly and efficiently”).
It would therefore be aberrant for the exhaustion requirement in §1252(d)(1) to be characterized as jurisdictional. Of course, “Congress is free to attach” jurisdictional consequences to a requirement that usually exists as a claim-processing rule. Henderson, 562 U. S., at 435. But to be confident Congress took that unexpected tack, we would need unmistakable evidence, on par with express language addressing the court’s jurisdiction. Nothing close appears here.
Instead, a second feature of the statute compounds our doubt that §1252(d)(1) qualifies as a jurisdictional rule: That provision’s language differs substantially from more clearly jurisdictional language in related statutory provisions. Elsewhere in the laws governing immigration cases, Congress specified that “no court shall have jurisdiction” to review certain matters.[1] Over and over again, Congress used that language in provisions that were enacted at the
- ↑ See, e.g., 8 U. S. C. §§1252(a)(2)(A), (a)(2)(B), (a)(2)(C), (b)(9), (g), 1182(a)(9)(B)(v), (d)(3)(B)(i), (d)(12), (h), (i)(2), 1158(a)(3), 1227(a)(3)(C)(ii), 1229c(f), 1255a(f)(4)(C); see also §1225(b)(1)(D) (“the court shall not have jurisdiction”).
