AI Generated Image (not the actual State Department website)
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, introduced a bill on Oct. 22 to repeal the diversity visa lottery, the program that offers up to 55,000 green cards a year to people from countries that send relatively few immigrants to the United States. The bill lands a week before the State Department must announce DV-2027 registration under a federal court order, and it moves a fight now being waged in court to the one forum that can settle it for good.
That is the point worth understanding. The lottery exists because Congress wrote it into the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1990. A judge can order the State Department to run it, and an administration can slow it down, but only Congress can abolish it. Self framed his bill as a direct answer to U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, who ordered the department this month to open the 2027 lottery it never launched. “We cannot allow activist judges to dictate our immigration policy,” Self said in announcing the bill, adding that “liberal judges” should not “force the administration to continue a failed immigration program.”
Self’s office ties the push to the administration’s suspension of the program last December, after a Portuguese national who had received a visa through the lottery was suspected of killing four people in shootings in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, a link Just the News also reported. On the other side of the record is Ohta’s ruling, which, as Newsweek reported, found the suspension “arbitrary and capricious” and treated the department’s failure to open registration as the effective cancellation of a program Congress requires.
Demand is not the program’s problem. The DV-2026 lottery drew 20,822,624 qualified entries for roughly 51,850 visas, about 400 entries for every visa available, a calculation from State Department figures. About 129,516 people, counting selectees and their families, were registered for that year.
What the diversity visa lottery bill cannot change this fall
A bill does nothing to the DV-2027 calendar. Self’s office has not released the text, and his announcement does not say whether a repeal would reach entrants already in line. Repeal has been tried before: the comprehensive immigration bill the Senate passed in 2013 would have ended the lottery, and the SMARTER Act introduced this month would abolish it as part of a broader overhaul. Filed less than two weeks before the midterm elections with no cosponsors named, Self’s bill is likely to matter more as a marker for the next Congress than as law this year.
What decides DV-2027 is the litigation. Under the schedule Ohta approved, the department must announce the registration period by Oct. 29, open registration on Nov. 1 for 30 days and notify selectees by Dec. 3. The government filed a notice of appeal on Oct. 19 and asked Ohta to stay her order, and no ruling on that request had been reported as of Oct. 24. Unless a court pauses the injunction, the deadlines hold. Because a selectee can get a visa only through Sept. 30, 2027, any delay comes straight out of the time winners have to finish their cases. Entrants should rely only on the State Department’s official diversity visa website, where entry is free.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources: Office of Rep. Keith Self, press release (Oct. 22, 2026); U.S. Department of State, DV-2026 Selected Entrants (entries, registrants and annual limit for DV-2026); Just the News (Oct. 22, 2026); Newsweek (updated Oct. 22, 2026); Courthouse News Service (Oct. 14, 2026); 8 U.S.C. 1153(c), diversity immigrants.
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