A new lawsuit over the 2027 Diversity Visa program was filed on Nov. 1 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, naming Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the defendant. The case is Ivan Ivannikov v. Marco Rubio, No. 2:26-cv-12783, according to the court’s docket. The complaint, a civil cover sheet, a notice of interested parties and a summons request were filed on Nov. 1; on Nov. 2 the clerk issued the summons and sent the standard notices assigning the case to a U.S. district judge and asking whether the parties consent to proceed before a magistrate judge.
It is the second suit this fall over a lottery that has not opened. The State Department’s Visas News page, read on Nov. 2, still lists “Countries Subject to Visa Bonds” (published Oct. 2) as its newest item among 155, with nothing announcing a 2027 registration period. In Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 3:26-cv-04738-JO-VET in the Southern District of California, Judge Jinsook Ohta granted a preliminary injunction on Oct. 14 and amended it on Oct. 21, ordering the State Department to announce a registration period by Oct. 29, open registration by Nov. 1 for 30 days, and notify selectees of their eligibility to apply by Dec. 3. The government appealed, and on Oct. 29 a Ninth Circuit panel (McKeown, N.R. Smith and Thomas) granted an emergency stay pending appeal in No. 26-6943. A stay means the injunction’s dates do not currently bind the department. The panel still wrote that it does “not endorse the Department’s failure to open the lottery registration period.”
The Ninth Circuit’s reasoning turned on who brought the first case: it held that Red Eagle Law, an immigration law firm whose practice includes representing selectees, was unlikely to show its interest fell within the zone of interests protected by the Diversity Visa statute, and Judge N. Randy Smith wrote separately that the firm also lacked Article III standing because a lawyer’s lost business is a collateral injury. The new suit’s plaintiff is an individual rather than a firm, which is what the appeal turned on; whether that changes the analysis is for the district court.
Newsweek, which reviewed the complaint, reported that it asks the court to order 30-day registration periods for both the DV-2027 and DV-2028 programs and seeks relief under the Mandamus Act. The complaint itself is not yet available on the public docket, so those details come from that account rather than from a document we could read.
The appeal is still running: the Ninth Circuit’s Oct. 20 schedule sets the government’s opening brief for Nov. 17 and the answering brief for Dec. 15. Under the statute the program makes up to 55,000 visas available a year, and the department normally draws roughly 100,000 selectees from qualifying countries to apply. For now the 2027 program has no registration period, and anyone waiting on it is waiting on a court.
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