The deadline falls tonight. A federal court has ordered the State Department to publish the fiscal year 2027 Diversity Visa registration period by midnight Eastern on October 29, 2026, and as of 12:32 p.m. Pacific today the page the order names still had not changed: travel.state.gov’s visas news list showed “Countries Subject to Visa Bonds,” published October 2, 2026, as its newest item. The program’s own site, dvprogram.state.gov, still carried the closed DV-2026 page and its 2026 entrant status check. No 2027 registration window had appeared on either.
The requirement comes from the amended preliminary injunction in Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 3:26-cv-04738-JO-VET, signed by Judge Jinsook Ohta on October 21. The order requires the department to announce the registration period on that visas news page with three things: the opening and closing dates, the website for electronic entries, and the requirements for participating, and to spread the same information through its other customary channels. Registration must open by midnight Eastern on November 1 and run thirty days. The department must notify selectees by midnight Eastern on December 3, and it may ask to move only that notification date, and only by filing a request by October 30.
The government is still asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to pause that schedule while it appeals. The newest entry on the circuit’s docket in No. 26-6943 is the government’s reply in support of its emergency stay motion, filed October 28 at 8:51 a.m. Eastern; the motion (docket entry 8) was filed October 23, the court set a response deadline of 5:00 p.m. Pacific on October 26, and the plaintiffs filed their response that day at 4:38 p.m. The docket page, refreshed October 29 at 10:15 a.m. Pacific, shows no order on the motion. The docket records filings, not their contents.
Below that, the district court’s record has not moved since Tuesday. Judge Ohta’s October 27 minute order denied as moot the government’s October 20 request for more time to answer the complaint, because the department filed its answer on October 23 (docket entry 35).
The Diversity Visa program is a separate pool of up to 55,000 visas a year, drawn by random selection from natives of countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. Nothing in this case moves employment-based cutoff dates: the November Visa Bulletin published this month is unaffected, and EB-2, EB-1A and H-1B filings keep their own timelines. What DV applicants are waiting on is a registration window that a court says must open Sunday. Both remaining questions turn on two records: the visas news page, which must change by midnight Eastern tonight, and the Ninth Circuit docket, which still owes an answer on the stay.
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