Biden-Appointed Judge Orders State Dept. to Open Diversity Visa Lottery

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 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 has to announce the registration period this week, open a 30-day window for electronic entries by Oct. 18, and notify selected applicants by Nov. 19. After that, it must process and award the visas until the 2027 allotment runs out or the fiscal year ends next September. The diversity visa program, better known as the green card lottery, hands out up to 50,000 immigrant visas a year to people from countries that send few immigrants to the United States. Congress created it in 1990. The ruling is a turnaround for Ohta. Weeks earlier, the judge denied an emergency bid from the same firm to force the program open, and questioned whether she had the power to do it at all. “You’re asking me to demand that the government restart this program,” Ohta said from the bench at that hearing. The suit was filed in July by Red Eagle Law, which sued Rubio over the department’s failure to open 2027 registration. The firm argued the inaction was “arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with law,” and said it had lost clients because much of its practice involves lottery applicants. Government lawyers countered that the firm had waited too long and that the statutory deadline to run the program had already passed, leaving the court no lawful way to order it reopened. The firm called the failure a “de facto cancellation.” The lottery has been in limbo since December, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paused it after the Brown University shooter was found to have 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 the department delayed processing in a related case. The order drew a run of dismissive replies under Josh Gerstein’s X post, where commenters questioned whether a judge can direct the executive branch to run an administrative program, while others seized on the name of the judge who did.