Law Firm Sued to Open Trump's Paused Green Card Lottery. Appeals Court Shuts It Again, 3-0

The green card lottery is staying shut, at least for now. On Thursday a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals froze a San Diego judge's order that would have forced Secretary of State Marco Rubio's State Department to open sign-ups for the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery by Nov. 1.

The vote was 3-0. Two of the three judges were appointed by Democrats: M. Margaret McKeown by Bill Clinton and Holly Thomas by Joe Biden. The third, N. Randy Smith, was picked by George W. Bush. And the panel marked its order "for publication," which means it now counts as Ninth Circuit precedent.

What the lottery is

Congress created the Diversity Visa program in 1990. Every year it hands out up to 55,000 green cards to people from countries that send few immigrants to America. The court laid out how it works: before each fiscal year the State Department holds a random drawing, picks roughly 100,000 people out of the millions who enter, and those winners then race to apply for the visas. Think of it as a raffle where the prize is permanent residence in the United States.

President Trump has wanted it gone for years. After the 2017 New York City truck attack, which killed eight people, Trump demanded Congress end the program, because the killer was a lottery winner, DHS recounted on X.

Then in December 2025, the administration said the man suspected of the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT professor, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had come in through the lottery in 2017 and gotten a green card. "This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote, as CBS News reported. "At President Trump's direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program."

Who sued, and why it failed

No would-be immigrant brought this case. The only plaintiff was Red Eagle Law, a San Diego immigration firm whose business includes representing lottery winners. When the department never scheduled DV-2027 sign-ups, the firm sued in August, arguing the State Department was breaking the law by not running the drawing.

On Oct. 14, U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta agreed and issued a preliminary injunction. She ordered the department to announce a sign-up period by Oct. 29, open registration by Nov. 1 and notify winners by Dec. 3.

The appeals court said the firm never had a real claim. Under the law that lets people sue federal agencies, a plaintiff has to be at least "arguably within the zone of interests" the statute protects. The lottery's purpose, the judges wrote, is to encourage immigration from low-immigration countries. A law firm's hope of billing future winners is not "more than marginally related" to that.

Their bottom line was one sentence: the program "was enacted to encourage immigration, not generate revenue for law firms."

The panel did not cheer the pause, and that's worth saying plainly. "We do not endorse the Department's failure to open the lottery registration period," it wrote. But a court can only rule for someone who has a right to sue, and Red Eagle wasn't that someone.

The 'floodgates' warning

Judge Smith went further in a concurrence. He said Red Eagle also lacks standing under the Constitution, because its injury is pure guesswork. A foreigner would have to enter the lottery, win it, apply, pass a consular interview, land one of at most 55,000 visas, and then pick a boutique San Diego firm over every other lawyer in the country, or no lawyer at all. The firm didn't even claim it had lost money, Smith noted, only that it had missed a chance to earn "downstream" income.

"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,'" he wrote, quoting the Supreme Court. Federal courts, he added, are "not a legislative assembly, a town square, or a faculty lounge."

What the early coverage got wrong

Some first reports called this a 2-1 ruling. It wasn't. The order is unsigned and "per curiam," meaning it speaks for the whole panel, and there is no dissent. Smith's separate opinion agrees with the result and adds another reason to rule the same way.

What happens next

The stay means Nov. 1 comes and goes with no lottery sign-ups while the appeal goes forward. The court told the clerk to set a briefing schedule on the injunction itself. With a 3-0 published order already saying the firm is likely to lose, Red Eagle starts that round deep in the hole.