Representative Keith Self, a Republican from Texas's 3rd congressional district, introduced legislation on Thursday, October 22, 2026, to repeal the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery, his office announced in a press release. The bill, H.R. 10896, is listed as “Introduced” in the 119th Congress, VisaVerge reported; its text was not available when it was filed, so its specific repeal language is not yet known.
Source: Rep. Keith Self, U.S. House (press release)
The Diversity Visa program offers permanent residence — a green card — to as many as 55,000 applicants each year, drawn from countries with historically lower levels of immigration to the United States, many of them in Africa, according to Self's office.
Source: Rep. Keith Self, U.S. House
The filing followed a court order from the prior week: a California judge ruled that the U.S. State Department must reinstate the program after the Trump administration suspended it last December, VisaVerge reported. Self linked his bill directly to that ruling.
Source: VisaVerge
Self's office said the December suspension followed an incident involving a Portuguese national who had received a visa through the program and was suspected of killing four people in two separate shootings in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. That account is the office's stated reason for the suspension; the man was described as a suspect, and this report does not treat suspicion as a conviction.
Source: Rep. Keith Self, U.S. House
“We cannot allow activist judges to dictate our immigration policy,” Self said in the release. “The American people elected Donald Trump and this Republican Congress to put America first. That means securing our borders and ending failed immigration policies. We cannot allow liberal judges to force the administration to continue a failed immigration program.”
Source: Rep. Keith Self, U.S. House
What happens next is limited and uncertain: introduction is only the first step, and the bill would have to pass committee and both chambers to become law. Earlier, separate proposals to end the program — including the House SAFE for America Act and the SMARTER Acts, and a Senate Visa Lottery Repeal Act — are also before Congress, VisaVerge noted. For context, nationals of high-immigration countries, including India, are not eligible for the Diversity Visa lottery, so the direct applicant impact would fall on people from low-immigration countries; for diaspora readers the bill matters as a signal of where US immigration legislation is heading.