A federal judge in San Diego refused on October 21 to pause the order that requires the State Department to run the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery, and re-issued the injunction with the deadlines the department must meet while its appeal goes forward. Registration is still not open: the first deadline in the order falls on October 29.
In an eight-page order, Judge Jinsook Ohta denied the government’s motion to stay the preliminary injunction in Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 3:26-cv-04738-JO-VET. Applying the four-factor test in Nken v. Holder, she found the department had not shown a likelihood of success on appeal and had identified no irreparable injury from being ordered to carry out what federal immigration law already requires. A stay, she wrote, “would effectively cancel the congressionally mandated 2027 Diversity Visa Program,” because registration, selection, application processing and visa issuance must all be finished by September 30, 2027. She also rejected the argument that the December deadline for notifying winners would foreclose appellate review, noting that in recent years the department has selected about 100,000 people for a maximum of 55,000 visas, and that selection is only the first step.
The same day, the court entered an amended injunction that supersedes its earlier orders and sets the timetable out in full. By midnight Eastern on October 29, 2026, the State Department must publicly announce the fiscal year 2027 registration period on its visas-news page, identifying the opening and closing dates, the website for entries and the requirements for participating, and must also distribute the announcement through its usual channels, including the Federal Register. Registration must open by midnight Eastern on November 1, 2026 and run for 30 days. Selectees must be notified by midnight Eastern on December 3, 2026, a date the department can ask to extend by filing a request by October 30. Those dates are looser than the ones the court first set on October 14 — announce by October 15, open by October 18, notify by November 19 — which it moved at the parties’ joint request.
The appeal remains pending at the Ninth Circuit as No. 26-6943. Its scheduling notice gives the government until November 17 to file its opening brief and Red Eagle Law until December 15 to answer, with corporate disclosure statements due November 3; counsel for both sides entered appearances on October 21. The appellate docket showed no ruling on any request for relief pending appeal as of the afternoon of October 22, so the district court’s deadlines stand for now.
None of this moves employment-based cutoff dates. The Diversity Visa program is a separate pool of up to 55,000 visas a year, awarded by random selection to natives of countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, and its numbers are not subtracted from the EB-1, EB-2 or EB-3 categories. What the ruling decides is whether the 2027 drawing happens at all, and on what clock: if the deadlines hold, the entry window is 30 days long and opens November 1.
Need help with your immigration petition? Visit QuickFiling.us for AI-guided NIW and EB-1A petition preparation.