US diversity visa lottery: appeals court ruling hands Trump administration a win
A liberal-majority appeals court in California has handed the Trump administration a victory by blocking a lower court's ruling that ordered the State Department to open its application pool for the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery, which admits roughly 55,000 immigrants each year from countries with low immigration rates.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Jinsook Ohta requiring the lottery pool to be opened. That injunction followed a November notice by Secretary of State Marco Rubio delaying the programme's acceptance of new applications in order to “implement certain changes”; the application period never opened.
A month later, the State Department ordered an indefinite pause on issuing diversity visas, after a Portuguese national who had been issued a lottery visa in 2017 committed a mass shooting at Brown University, killing two people and injuring nine others. The shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was also tied to the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor two days after the Brown shooting.
The appeals court ruled that the immigration law firm Red Eagle, which represents individuals going through the visa lottery process, did not have standing to sue the federal government. The court ruled that the programme was intended to “encourage immigration, not generate revenue for law firms.”
The court wrote: “If Red Eagle Law were allowed to allege standing based upon its hypothetical or conjectural collateral injury, we would be opening the floodgates, allowing all lawyers to ‘roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing.’”
However, the court made clear its ruling was based on procedural grounds and did not weigh whether the State Department failed to follow the law. “We do not endorse the Department's failure to open the lottery registration period,” the court wrote.
Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, called the liberal court's decision a “very easy call” in a post on X. “Here, the plaintiff was a law firm not bringing a claim on behalf of someone in the diversity visa lottery but on behalf of the firm itself,” Kambli wrote. “The district court should have never gone beyond standing.”
President Donald Trump has been vocal about his opposition to the Visa Lottery Program for years. During his January 2018 State of the Union address, he called for ending the programme, arguing that visas should be issued based on merit.
