A federal judge has ordered the State Department to reopen registration for the fiscal year 2027 Diversity Visa (DV) program — the “green card lottery” — after the department did not open it on time.
Judge Jinsook Ohta of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California granted a preliminary injunction on October 14, 2026, in Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 3:26-cv-04738. The order requires Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the department to:
- publicly announce the DV-2027 registration period on the State Department’s visas news page and through its other usual channels, including the Federal Register, by midnight Eastern on October 29, 2026;
- open registration by midnight Eastern on November 1, 2026, and keep it open for 30 days, accepting electronic entries under 8 U.S.C. §§ 1153 and 1154(a)(1)(I) and 22 C.F.R. § 42.33;
- notify the selectees eligible to apply for a DV-2027 visa by midnight Eastern on December 3, 2026, and process and award their applications until the fiscal year 2027 visa allocation is exhausted or September 30, 2027.
The same day it granted the injunction, the court approved a joint request from the parties to modify it. That order moved the original deadlines — October 15 for the announcement, October 18 for opening and November 19 for notifying selectees — to the later dates above.
Red Eagle Law, a Southern California firm that helps applicants enter the lottery, sued in August 2026 after the department failed to launch the 2027 registration on time and later argued it was too late. The court denied a temporary restraining order in September and heard argument on the preliminary injunction in late September before issuing its ruling on October 14.
The Diversity Visa program makes up to 55,000 immigrant visas available each fiscal year to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. It is separate from employment-based categories such as EB-2 NIW, EB-1A and EB-3 and from the H-1B work visa: a DV selection comes from a random drawing, not a job offer or an employer petition. The program’s annual visas are not counted against, and do not add to, the employment-based numbers.
For readers tracking the employment-based backlogs, the ruling does not change EB cutoff dates or add visas. What it does is restart a green-card program that the plaintiff said had been effectively cancelled for the year. Because the registration window is short — the order sets 30 days — anyone who follows the lottery should watch the State Department’s official announcement for the exact opening and closing dates rather than relying on third-party sites.
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