A federal judge has ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department to reopen the 2027 diversity visa lottery after the Trump administration paused registration, forcing a court-run restart of the green-card drawing.
U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta granted a preliminary injunction requiring the State Department to establish and open registration for the fiscal year 2027 Diversity Visa program after officials failed to begin the process on the normal schedule. Newsweek reported the order directs the department to publicly announce and open the registration window by midnight Eastern time on Thursday and keep it open for at least 30 days.
The ruling lands squarely on Rubio’s agency. Immigration law firm Red Eagle Law L.C. sued the secretary and the department under the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing the delay blocked a congressionally authorized lottery and cost the firm work it says it could not recover later.
Ohta found the government’s inaction effectively suspended the program without a sufficient explanation and labeled it “arbitrary and capricious government action.” She also held that Red Eagle had standing and that its claimed economic losses could count as irreparable harm.
Under the injunction, the State Department must process entries until 55,000 visas are issued or the 2027 fiscal year ends. The court said it would keep jurisdiction over how the order is carried out.
Breitbart reported additional court-imposed milestones tied to the same order: registration announced this week, a 30-day entry window opened by Oct. 18, and selectees notified by Nov. 19. That account also described the diversity visa program as having been paused since December before the injunction forced it back open.
Attorney Curtis Morrison, representing Red Eagle, provided the detail that Ohta set the midnight Eastern Thursday deadline to announce and open registration and required the window to stay open at least 30 days.
On September 3, the same judge denied without prejudice the firm’s earlier request for a temporary restraining order that would have forced an immediate restart. She allowed the case to move on an expedited track instead, then issued the broader preliminary injunction later.
The diversity visa program, created by Congress in 1990, offers green cards through a lottery to eligible people from countries with low rates of U.S. immigration. Winners still have to meet regular immigration requirements before receiving a visa.
The Trump administration did not open fiscal 2027 registration before the prior fiscal year ended. In court, the government argued that opening a delayed registration period would conflict with federal timing regulations, including rules that call for a registration period of at least 30 days.
Ohta rejected that timing argument. She found that sticking to the government’s reading of the timetable under these circumstances would prevent the fiscal 2027 lottery from taking place at all.
At an earlier hearing on the dispute, Ohta voiced the core demand from the bench.
"You’re asking me to demand that the government restart this program," Ohta said from the bench at that hearing.
That is exactly what the injunction does. It puts a federal judge in the position of compelling the executive branch to run a visa lottery the administration had left closed while it tightened other legal immigration pathways in the second Trump term.
Rubio’s broader portfolio at State has drawn steady attention, from personnel fights to major foreign-policy moves such as a possible $2.6 billion Ukraine air-defense sale cleared by the department.
A State Department spokesperson, asked about the green-card fight, did not litigate the order in public detail and said the department generally does not comment on pending or ongoing cases. The spokesperson did state the administration’s baseline on visas.
"Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump and Secretary Rubio, the Department of State is putting American interests first in our visa process."
Red Eagle’s case is not framed as a pure policy brief from a migrant advocacy group. The firm told the court it relies on work representing diversity visa applicants and that the shutdown of registration caused financial harm it could not recover later through damages. Ohta treated that claimed loss as potential irreparable harm and found the firm likely to succeed on its claim that the government’s inaction was unlawful.
In plain terms, a private immigration practice used the Administrative Procedure Act to haul the Secretary of State into court and force open a lottery that awards tens of thousands of green cards a year. The judge agreed the pause looked like an unexplained suspension of a program Congress wrote into law in 1990.
Conservatives have long criticized the diversity lottery as a random path to permanent residency that does not prioritize skills, wages, or assimilation. The Trump administration’s decision not to open the 2027 window fit a wider effort to tighten visa and humanitarian channels while ramping up enforcement. A single district-court injunction now overrides that pause on a court-built calendar.
Rubio himself remains a central 2028 figure, including early polling that has shown him outpacing Vance against top Democrats, even as court fights pile onto his State Department docket.
The order does not revise the statute. It does force the executive branch to administer a lottery it had left closed, on pain of ongoing judicial supervision. Ohta kept jurisdiction over implementation, which means compliance fights can return to her courtroom if registration, processing, or notice slip.
That posture mirrors other recent moments when federal courts have stepped in to reverse or block policy choices, including cases like the Fifth Circuit’s strike-down of a federal ban on interstate handgun sales, different subject, same pattern of judges setting the outer bounds of what agencies may stop or start.
Open questions remain outside the four corners of the injunction itself. The full docket caption and courthouse location were not spelled out in the initial coverage. Exact dollar figures for Red Eagle’s claimed losses were not detailed. And public reporting at the time of the Newsweek update did not confirm whether the department had already met the Thursday midnight Eastern announce-and-open deadline.
What is clear is the clash of incentives. The White House and Rubio’s department say American interests come first in the visa line. An immigration firm says it needs the lottery open to do its paid work. A federal judge sided with the firm, called the pause arbitrary and capricious, and put the State Department on a short clock to restart a program that hands out green cards by chance.
Personnel drama has followed Rubio before, including a reported hire of an ex-DeSantis aide that drew its own controversy, but this fight is about policy control, not staffing.
Taxpayers and lawful residents live with the downstream results of who enters, how fast, and under what rules. When a lottery Congress built in 1990 collides with an administration trying to hit the brakes, the courtroom has now become the place that decides whether the drawing runs.
A nation that cannot set and keep its own visa priorities will keep watching judges reopen the gates one injunction at a time.