Ninth Circuit Blocks an Order to Open the 2027 Diversity Visa Lottery, Ruling the Law Firm That Sued Had No Standing
A 2-1 panel in California sided with the State Department on procedure only. The judges said they did not endorse the failure to open the lottery. The program admits about 55,000 immigrants a year.
An appeals court that Fox News calls liberal-majority gave the Trump administration a win on the visa lottery, Fox reports.
The ruling. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta. Her order would have forced the State Department to open applications for the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery, which admits roughly 55,000 immigrants a year from countries with low immigration to the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a notice in November delaying the program to "implement certain changes," and the application period never opened.
The reason. The panel held that the plaintiff, an immigration law firm called Red Eagle that represents people going through the lottery, lacked standing because it was suing over its own hypothetical injury, not on behalf of an applicant. The court wrote that the program was meant to "encourage immigration, not generate revenue for law firms," and warned that a different result would open "the floodgates" for lawyers to "roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing."
The caveat. The court said its ruling was procedural and did not decide whether the State Department broke the law. "We do not endorse the Department's failure to open the lottery registration period," the judges wrote.
The backdrop. Fox says the State Department ordered an indefinite pause on diversity visas a month after the delay, following a mass shooting at Brown University by a Portuguese national who received a lottery visa in 2017. The attack killed two people and wounded nine, and he was also tied to the killing of an MIT professor. Former federal prosecutor Abhishek Kambli, a partner at Holtzman Vogel, called the standing question a "very easy call." President Trump has criticized the lottery since at least 2018, when he asked that visas be given on merit.
Note for readers: the ruling does not end the lawsuit or settle whether the lottery must run. The "liberal" label is Fox's.