A federal appeals court granted the Trump administration a stay on reopening the diversity visa program, overturning a lower court order.
A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit panel said on Oct. 29 that Red Eagle Law, the immigration firm that challenged the effective cancellation of a year of the program, did not have a cause of action or fit within a “zone of interests” that is protected by federal law.
“The government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of this suit, because Red Eagle has not demonstrated that it is ‘arguably within the zone of interests to be protected or regulated’ by the Diversity Visa Program statute,” the panel said in a per curiam opinion, quoting a ruling in another case.
The Supreme Court has held that plaintiffs suing over alleged Administrative Procedure Act violations must show interests that are “arguably within the zone of interests to be protected or regulated by the statute.”
The panel granted the government’s emergency motion for a stay pending appeal, staying the preliminary injunction a judge entered in the case earlier in October.
The State Department declined to comment on the ruling, since the case is still ongoing.
Curtis Morrison, an attorney with Red Eagle Law, said in a post on X that the firm would move forward with other litigation to challenge the government over the visa program.
The State Department must annually award up to 55,000 visas to people from countries with low immigration rates to the United States under the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the Green Card lottery.
Each year, the first step is holding a lottery that selects about 100,000 people from those countries to apply for visas.
The State Department did not open the lottery registration period in late 2025, as expected, instead announcing that it was implementing changes to the program. President Donald Trump later directed officials to pause the program, after the suspect in a shooting was identified as a recipient of a visa through it.
Red Eagle sued, alleging that the administration was attempting to “effectively bar legal avenues of immigration,” violating federal law.
Judge Jinsook Ohta of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California agreed. She said that the move was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, because the State Department, when announcing the initial postponement of the registration period, did not offer any explanation.
Ohta also concluded that Red Eagle had standing to sue in part because the firm has represented people who applied to the program.
Under Ninth Circuit precedent, plaintiffs in immigration cases can satisfy the zone of interests requirement by sharing a common or consistent interest with the intended beneficiaries of a law. Red Eagle’s interest in reopening the visa program aligned with the aims of individuals seeking visas and the law’s goal of issuing visas through the program, the judge said.
The Ninth Circuit panel disagreed.
It said that the law’s purpose is to encourage immigration from countries with low immigration rates to the United States, while Red Eagle’s financial interest is in representing applicants. The panel said that is only “marginally related” to the law’s purpose.
Circuit Judge N. Randy Smith said in a concurring opinion that Red Eagle also lacks standing to challenge the government’s failure to implement the program for fiscal year 2027, because it did not bring a suit on behalf of a foreign national who might qualify for a diversity visa.
“If Red Eagle Law were allowed to allege standing based upon its hypothetical or conjectural collateral injury, we would be opening the floodgates, allowing all lawyers to ‘roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing,’” Smith said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the per curiam decision. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
