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A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration a win in the fight over the Diversity Visa lottery, blocking a lower court order that would have required the State Department to open applications for the 2027 program, according to Fox News.
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Shop NowIn a 2-1 decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, Fox News Digital reports. The lottery admits roughly 55,000 immigrants each year from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
The dispute began when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a notice in November delaying the program’s acceptance of new applications in order to “implement certain changes.” The application period never opened.
A month later, the State Department ordered an indefinite pause on issuing diversity visas after a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two people and injured nine.
The shooter, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had been issued a lottery visa in 2017. He was also tied to the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days after the Brown shooting.
The appeals court did not decide whether the pause was lawful. It found instead that Red Eagle, the immigration law firm that brought the challenge, lacked standing to sue. The firm represents people going through the lottery process, but the court said the program was meant to “encourage immigration, not generate revenue for law firms.”
“If Red Eagle Law were allowed to allege standing based upon its hypothetical or conjectural collateral injury, we would be opening the floodgates, allowing all lawyers to ‘roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing,'” the court wrote.
The panel was explicit that the ruling rested on procedure. “We do not endorse the Department’s failure to open the lottery registration period,” the court wrote.
Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, called it a “very easy call” in a post on X, noting that the firm sued on its own behalf rather than for anyone in the lottery.
The Ninth Circuit has often ruled against President Trump, including on his 2017 travel restrictions and on a policy barring asylum for migrants who crossed the southern border between ports of entry. Trump has opposed the lottery for years and called for ending it in his January 2018 State of the Union address, arguing visas should be awarded on merit.
With the injunction blocked, the State Department is no longer under a court order to open the 2027 registration period.
