Judge Jinsook Ohta, a Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge who immigrated to the United States from South Korea at age six, just issued a preliminary injunction forcing the State Department to reopen the 2027 diversity visa lottery. The registration window must open within 30 days, with a deadline of October 18 and selected applicants notified by November 19.

The program hands out up to 50,000 immigrant visas every single year — to random applicants, selected by lottery.

Congress created the diversity visa lottery in 1990, and it has imported nearly 500,000 migrants per decade since. The Trump administration paused the program back in December after investigators discovered the Brown University shooter had entered the country through it in 2017. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had kept the lottery frozen while the administration reviewed the program's security implications.

Then a Southern California immigration law firm called Red Eagle Law filed suit in U.S. District Court in California, and the case landed on Judge Ohta's desk. At an earlier hearing, Ohta herself framed the stakes plainly: "You're asking me to demand that the government restart this program."

She then demanded exactly that.

The preliminary injunction is the second federal court order forcing the administration's hand on diversity visas. A separate Northern California federal judge had already found the State Department was deliberately delaying the processing of diversity visa applications, and in August, the department resumed issuing diversity visas under that earlier order. Ohta's ruling goes further — it doesn't just require processing existing applications. It orders the government to open an entirely new lottery cycle.

The administration paused this program because a terrorist used it to get into the country. The court's position is that the pause doesn't matter — open the doors anyway. A program that selects immigrants at random, with no skills-based criteria, no employer sponsorship, no family ties required. Just names in a hat, 50,000 times a year.

Red Eagle Law and the plaintiffs framed this as a simple procedural question — the statute says the lottery shall occur, so it must occur. That framing requires you to ignore why it was paused. The Brown University shooting wasn't a bureaucratic oversight. It was a body count created by a program that let a future killer walk through the front door because his name got pulled out of a digital fishbowl.

This is the pattern now. The administration acts on a legitimate security concern. A firm shops the case to a friendly district. A single judge — appointed by the previous president — issues an injunction that overrides executive branch immigration authority. The lottery was frozen for a reason. The reason had a name and a victim count.

Judge Ohta's registration deadline is October 18. The next 50,000 names go into the hat by November 19.