A federal court ordered the government to resume Diversity Visa processing after an eight-month freeze — and issuance restarted. It is a real and consequential win.
It is also a narrower one than the headlines suggested. The court restored a process, not a guaranteed visa; ordinary eligibility and screening still apply; and — the part no ruling could change — the statute's midnight-September-30 deadline did not move. For DV-2026 selectees, the race is now against the calendar, not the court.
Filed 16:40 EDT · The consular desk · General information, not legal advice · The fiscal-year deadline is statutory and, courts have generally held, not extendable
The diversity visa program — the "green card lottery," which makes up to 55,000 immigrant visas available each year to nationals of countries with low rates of immigration to the United States — spent most of fiscal 2026 frozen. In December, the State Department paused all diversity-visa issuance at consulates worldwide pending a review of screening and vetting protocols, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suspended adjudication of the adjustment-of-status cases filed by lottery selectees, and a separate suspension affecting the nationals of dozens of countries swept in DV applicants as well. On August 28, a federal court in the Northern District of California, in Medani v. Trump, temporarily vacated all three policies and ordered the government to return to ordinary adjudication where practicable; the State Department confirmed that issuance resumed that day.
That is a genuine victory for the roughly fifty-four thousand people still holding DV-2026 selections, and it should be reported as one. But it is worth being precise about its shape, because the coverage has not always been. The order did not hand anyone a green card; it restored a chance at one. Ordinary eligibility determinations, security screening, and administrative processing all still apply, and a selectee can still be found ineligible on the merits. Above all, the ruling did not — and could not — move the deadline. By statute, diversity-visa numbers for fiscal 2026 expire at midnight on September 30, and a visa not issued by then is lost for good; courts have consistently held they cannot order issuance after the fiscal year closes. A case that is active but uninterviewed on October 1 is a case that has ended. Reports flattening the decision into a headline about tens of thousands of green cards handed down got the law exactly backward: the door was reopened, but the calendar still closes it.
Both sides of the underlying dispute deserve fair statement. The government's position is that the December pause was a legitimate review of the diversity program's screening and vetting — an effort to verify identity and eligibility and to guard against security and public-safety risks — and that it complied with the order once entered. The plaintiffs' position, which the court found sufficiently likely to succeed, is that a blanket, categorical suspension unlawfully froze a program Congress created and threatened to run out the clock on a one-time opportunity that cannot be recovered. The court's resolution split the difference: the categorical policies may not be used as a blanket reason to halt cases, but ordinary checks — and the statutory deadline — remain.
What that leaves, with three weeks on the clock, is a pure problem of throughput. For the selectees — many at high-volume consular posts across Africa and Europe — the only variables that matter now are interview availability, document and medical readiness, and how fast any remaining administrative processing clears, all inside a window that shrinks by the day. A follow-up hearing on September 18 will test whether the government is moving in earnest. The desks below take the law and the response in turn.