A liberal-majority appeals court in California handed the Trump administration a victory by blocking a lower court's ruling that ordered the State Department to open its application pool for the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery, which admits roughly 55,000 immigrants from low-immigration countries each year.In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction issued by U.S.District Judge Jinsook Ohta requiring the lottery pool to be opened after Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a notice in November delaying the program's acceptance of new applications in order to "implement certain changes," but the application period never opened.A month later, the State Department ordered an indefinite pause on issuing diversity visas after a Portuguese national who was issued a lottery visa in 2017 committed a mass shooting at Brown University, killing two people and injuring nine others.
The shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was also tied to the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor two days after the Brown University shooting.FBI REVEALS BROWN UNIVERSITY MASS SHOOTER BEGAN PLOTTING MASSACRE AS EARLY AS 2022, BLAMED VICTIMSThe Trump administration has been aggressive about revoking visas of foreign nationals, having revoked 100,000 visas in 2025 (Harry Hamburg/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images; Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images)The Ninth Circuit has been a perennial thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, having ruled against key portions of Trump's 2017 executive order restricting travel from predominantly Muslim countries and blocked a policy barring immigrants from being eligible for asylum if they crossed the southern border between ports of entry.However, the appeals court ruled that the lower court's preliminary injunction could not be enforced, finding that the immigration law firm Red Eagle, which represents individuals going through the visa lottery process, did not have standing to sue the ...