Registration for the DV-2027 green card lottery will not open on November 1, after the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit paused a lower court order that had required the State Department to reopen the programme.
Millions of people around the world apply for the lottery each year, and the ruling leaves them without a date to enter, even though the visa year for DV-2027 already began on October 1 with no lottery ever held for it.
A three-judge panel granted the government an emergency stay on October 29 in Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 26-6943, suspending a preliminary injunction issued by the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The stay lasts while the government’s appeal proceeds, and the order sets no replacement date for registration.
Judge Jinsook Ohta had issued the injunction on October 14, ordering the State Department to announce the registration period by October 29, open electronic registration by November 1 for 30 days, and notify selected entrants by December 3. Those deadlines are now frozen, and the official entry website, dvprogram.state.gov, says entries are not being accepted at this time.
The panel’s reasoning was procedural, not a final judgment on whether the lottery should run. It found the government had made a strong showing that Red Eagle Law, the California immigration firm that brought the case, likely falls outside the “zone of interests” protected by the Diversity Visa statute.
Congress created the programme to encourage immigration from countries with historically low admission rates to the United States, the panel said, not to generate business for law firms. Red Eagle Law represents lottery selectees, and its anticipated fees from future clients were therefore outside the interests the statute protects, according to the order.
Judge N. Randy Smith separately concurred on standing grounds, while the panel as a whole was careful to separate its procedural finding from any approval of the government’s conduct. “We do not endorse the Department’s failure to open the lottery registration period,” the panel wrote.
Red Eagle Law founder Curtis Morrison has vowed to file a fresh lawsuit on behalf of a prospective applicant, rather than a law firm, in an attempt to cure the standing problem identified by the court. That new case has not yet been filed, according to reporting on the ruling.
The State Department has not announced any new registration date since the stay. Its published DV-2027 notice still identifies October 1, 2026, through September 30, 2027, as the visa application period for selectees, but with no registration held and no drawing made, that window is already running.
Federal law provides up to 55,000 diversity immigrant visas each year, subject to statutory deductions. Winners must still meet education or work-experience requirements, pass admissibility checks, and complete processing before the fiscal year ends on September 30, 2027.
DV-2027 is the first diversity visa year in the programme’s history to begin with no lottery at all. The State Department said on November 5, 2025, that it was changing the entry process and would announce dates as soon as practicable, but no dates ever followed.
In December 2025, the programme was paused entirely at the president’s direction, following a shooting at Brown University and the killing of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A court order in a separate case, Medani v. Trump, blocked that pause in August 2026, but the registration window for DV-2027 had effectively closed by then.
At a hearing in September, a Justice Department lawyer argued that running DV-2027 now had become a “literal impossibility,” because programme rules require a registration period of at least 30 days within the fiscal year before the visas become available. The Ninth Circuit did not rule on that argument, deciding the stay only on standing.
Applicants should treat any website or agent promising entry into DV-2027, or a guaranteed result, as a scam, according to State Department guidance. Entry is free and online-only through the official portal, and selection alone never guarantees a visa.
For now, the lottery remains closed, the appeal continues with a briefing schedule still to be set, and prospective entrants have no confirmed date to apply. Any reopening now depends on a further court ruling, a new lawsuit, or the State Department choosing to act on its own.
