A federal judge has ordered the State Department to open registration for the 2027 diversity visa lottery. U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden appointee who immigrated from South Korea at age six, granted the preliminary injunction on Wednesday, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the department to run the green card lottery on a court-set timeline. The order came in a lawsuit brought by a Southern California immigration firm.
The department is required to announce the registration period this week, open a 30-day window for electronic entries by October 18, and notify selected applicants by November 19. Following this, it must process and award the visas until the 2027 allotment is exhausted or the fiscal year ends next September.
The diversity visa program, commonly referred to as the green card lottery, allocates up to 50,000 immigrant visas annually to individuals from countries that send few immigrants to the United States. This program was established by Congress in 1990.
The ruling marks a reversal for Judge Ohta, who weeks earlier denied an emergency request from the same firm to compel the program's reopening and questioned her authority to do so. "You’re asking me to demand that the government restart this program," Ohta stated during that hearing.
The lawsuit was filed in July by Red Eagle Law, which sued Rubio over the department’s failure to initiate 2027 registration. The firm claimed that the inaction was "arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with law," and noted it had lost clients due to the nature of its practice involving lottery applicants.
Government attorneys argued that the firm had delayed too long and that the statutory deadline to run the program had already passed, leaving the court without a lawful means to order its reopening. The firm characterized the failure as a "de facto cancellation."
The lottery has been in limbo since December, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paused it following the discovery that the Brown University shooter had entered the country through the program in 2017. The State Department resumed issuing diversity visas in August under a separate court order, and a second federal judge in Northern California has found that the department delayed processing in a related case.
The order prompted a range of dismissive responses under Josh Gerstein’s X post, with some commenters questioning whether a judge can direct the executive branch to operate an administrative program, while others focused on the judge's identity.