The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday, October 29, granted the federal government's emergency request to pause a lower-court order that would have forced the U.S. State Department to reopen registration for the fiscal year 2027 Diversity Visa lottery — the programme widely known as the green card lottery. Bloomberg Law reported the Thursday order hours after it was issued, and immigration law offices that displayed the filed order, as well as Red Eagle Law attorney Curtis Morrison in a post on X, confirmed that an emergency stay had been granted in the case, Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio.

Source: Bloomberg Law

The stay lands on the exact day the State Department's deadline expired. Under an amended preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta of the Southern District of California, the department had to announce the DV-2027 registration period by midnight Eastern Time on October 29, open electronic registration by November 1 for 30 days, and notify selected entrants by December 3. With the Ninth Circuit's stay now in place, none of those deadlines is in force while the government's appeal proceeds — registration will not open on November 1.

A follow-up to the October court order

This is the newest turn in a case Awaaz Punjab reported on October 24, when Judge Ohta's order directing the State Department to open DV-2027 registration by November 1 was the latest development. Red Eagle Law, a California immigration law firm, sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio in August 2026 after the State Department failed to open the lottery on its usual schedule. On October 14 the judge granted a preliminary injunction from the bench, and her written order of October 19 found that the department had, almost a year later, done nothing to open registration and had provided no reason for that inaction — conduct the court held was likely arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The government appealed to the Ninth Circuit on October 19 (appeal No. 26-6943) and asked both courts to pause the injunction. Judge Ohta refused on October 21, writing that a stay would effectively cancel the congressionally mandated 2027 Diversity Visa Program. The government then took its emergency request to the Ninth Circuit, which set a response deadline of 5 p.m. Pacific Time on October 26 — and on October 29 it granted the pause the district court had denied.

What the Diversity Visa programme is

The Diversity Visa programme, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, makes up to 55,000 immigrant visas available each fiscal year to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. Registration normally opens in early October. For DV-2027 it never did: on November 5, 2025, the State Department said it was changing the entry process and would announce a start date as soon as practicable, and the programme was later paused. Fiscal year 2027 began on October 1, 2026, with no registration at all — the first time in more than three decades that a fiscal year had started without the lottery moving forward, according to case trackers following the litigation.

Why this matters to diaspora families

The lottery is one of the few U.S. immigration routes that does not require a family sponsor, an employer or a large investment, which is why its fate is watched closely by hopeful applicants in Punjab, across India and around the world, and by diaspora families in the United States and Canada whose relatives hope to enter. Every week of litigation eats into a fixed clock: by law, every DV-2027 visa must be issued by September 30, 2027, and unused visa numbers do not carry over to the next year. That is the core of Red Eagle Law's argument — and of Judge Ohta's warning that pausing the programme could cancel it in practice.

What happens next

The appeal itself now proceeds on the Ninth Circuit's timetable; case trackers list the government's opening brief as due November 17 and Red Eagle Law's answering brief on December 15. A panel will then decide whether Judge Ohta's injunction stands, is narrowed or is overturned. Until the appeals court rules otherwise, the emergency stay keeps the October 29 announcement deadline, the November 1 registration opening and the December 3 notification date suspended. The State Department has posted no DV-2027 registration dates, and its November 5, 2025 notice remains the entry-period announcement on its website. A separate bill, H.R. 10896, introduced in the House on October 22, would end the Diversity Visa programme altogether; it has been referred to committee and is not law.

For now, the practical position is simple: the green card lottery for 2027 is paused again — this time by the appeals court — and anyone waiting to enter should watch for a ruling from the Ninth Circuit and for official dates, if any, on travel.state.gov rather than acting on social-media claims.