A federal judge born in South Korea has ordered the Trump administration to restart the diversity visa lottery, the program President Donald Trump suspended last year after a green card holder who came through it allegedly killed three people in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta of the Southern District of California issued a preliminary injunction on Wednesday directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to hold the 2027 lottery, which offers up to 55,000 green cards a year to applicants from countries that send relatively few immigrants to the United States. Ohta, a Biden appointee, was born in Seoul in 1976 and immigrated to the U.S. at age six.
Under a revised timeline both sides requested, the State Department must announce the registration period by October 29, open online entries by November 1, keep the window open for 30 days, and notify winners by December 3. The department must then process selectees’ applications until that year’s visas run out or the fiscal year ends on September 30, 2027.
The case was brought by Red Eagle Law, a California immigration firm that told the court diversity visa clients make up a large portion of its business. The firm sued Rubio in August after the department failed to open registration, which normally begins each fall.
Government lawyers argued the legal deadlines for running the 2027 lottery had already passed. Ohta, who had earlier denied the firm’s request for a temporary restraining order, rejected that position, finding that sticking to the usual timetable would mean no lottery would happen at all.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the pause in December after authorities identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, as the gunman who killed two students at Brown University and then murdered MIT professor Nuno Loureiro in his home. Neves Valente, who was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, obtained his green card through the lottery in 2017.
The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.
In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.
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.
— Special Envoy Kristi Noem (@EnvoyNoem) December 19, 2025
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote at the time.
The State Department followed by halting issuance of diversity visas indefinitely, and in March it finalized a rule requiring entrants to submit a valid passport when they enter.
Trump has sought to end the lottery since his first term, when he pressed Congress to scrap it after an Uzbek national who entered through the program killed eight people in a 2017 truck attack in New York City. Congress created the program in 1990 and has never repealed it.
Ohta’s order comes after a federal court in a separate case lifted the December suspension on visa issuance in August.
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