Judge Orders the State Department to Open the 2027 Green Card Lottery, Leaving Winners Less Than a Year to Get Their Visas

A federal judge in San Diego on Oct. 14 ordered the State Department to open registration for the 2027 diversity visa lottery, the program Congress created to award up to 55,000 green cards a year to people from countries that send few immigrants to the United States. The preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta brings back a lottery the department never launched, but it squeezes a process that normally runs close to two years into about eleven months, and the government has told the court that timetable is legally impossible.

The order in Red Eagle Law v. Rubio requires Secretary of State Marco Rubio to announce the registration period by midnight Oct. 15, according to Courthouse News. The announcement must give opening and closing dates, the entry website and the participation rules, and go out through the Federal Register and the department’s other usual channels. Registration must stay open for 30 days. The department must then notify the people selected and process their cases until the visas run out or the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, 2027. Breitbart News reported that the order calls for the entry window to open by Oct. 18 and for selectees to be notified by Nov. 19.

A lottery that runs on a fixed clock

Every part of this case turns on dates. Diversity visas belong to a single fiscal year, and any not issued by Sept. 30 are gone. In 2024 the D.C. Circuit, in Goodluck v. Biden, threw out an order that would have reserved unused numbers past the deadline. That leaves no room to make up lost time later.

The last normal cycle shows how much time is being lost. State Department figures show registration for DV-2026 ran from Oct. 2 to Nov. 7, 2024, and drew 20,822,624 qualified entries. The department registered about 129,516 selectees, a count that includes spouses and children, for a visa year that ended Sept. 30, 2026. DV-2027 entrants will be competing for the same pool on a calendar cut by more than half.

The department announced on Nov. 5, 2025, that it was changing the entry process and would set a DV-2027 start date “as soon as practicable.” It never did, and the visa year opened on Oct. 1 with no lottery. At a September hearing, Justice Department lawyer Ian Pike argued that the rules call for a 30-day registration period in the fiscal year before the visas become available, so a registration that ends during fiscal 2027 could only feed fiscal 2028 visas, Newsweek reported. An order to do otherwise “just can’t happen now,” he said. Curtis Morrison, the Red Eagle Law founder who brought the case, called the department’s inaction a “de facto cancellation.” After the ruling he told Courthouse News, “We won.”

Opening the door is not the same as issuing visas

Even if registration opens on schedule, the practical effect is likely to be far fewer diversity visas than the ceiling allows. Selectees must file the DS-260 immigrant visa application, gather civil documents, get a medical exam and sit for a consular interview. The last program year showed what a late start costs. After a court ordered the stalled DV-2026 program back to work, many posts could not resume immigrant visa work until staff finished new public charge training, and the department issued 2,026 diversity visas between Aug. 28 and Sept. 28, according to its own status reports cited in a Sept. 30 order in Medani v. Trump, a fraction of the program’s annual allotment. Selectees already in the United States can apply to adjust status through USCIS, but the same Sept. 30 cutoff applies to them.

The other open question is whether the order survives. Having called compliance impossible, the government can ask Judge Ohta or the Ninth Circuit to pause the injunction. The Justice Department did not respond to Courthouse News’s request for comment. If a stay arrived after entries had been filed, the status of those entries would be unclear, a risk for anyone weighing the lottery as their only route to a green card.

Would-be entrants should also watch for fraud. In past years the department charged nothing to enter and accepted entries only through its official site, dvprogram.state.gov. Whether the changes it promised for DV-2027 alter any of that will be clear only when the instructions are published.

How the cycle normally works

In a typical year, the diversity visa lottery runs on a roughly two-year calendar. The State Department opens online registration in early October and keeps it open for about a month, usually closing in early November. Entrants then wait about six months. In early May of the following year, they can check whether they were selected on the department’s official site, dvprogram.state.gov, using the confirmation number they got when they entered. Selection does not guarantee a visa. Selectees use the months before the visa year begins to file the DS-260 application and gather civil documents. Visas for that program year can be issued only from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 of the following year, and interviews are scheduled by rank number as visa numbers become available.

Under that schedule, DV-2027 registration should have run in October and November 2025, with results posted around May 2026, so selectees could begin interviews when the visa year opened on Oct. 1, 2026. Instead, registration will open in the visa year itself. Selection, paperwork, medical exams and interviews must all fit into the eleven months left before the Sept. 30, 2027, cutoff.

Dates to track

Midnight Oct. 15: deadline for the State Department’s public announcement of the DV-2027 registration period, per Courthouse News.
Oct. 18: date by which the entry window must open, according to Breitbart News.
Nov. 19: date by which selectees must be notified, according to Breitbart News.
Sept. 30, 2027: last day any DV-2027 visa can be issued.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

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Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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