In December 2025, a Portuguese national named Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente carried out deadly shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was in the country through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program — the federal green card lottery that hands out 55,000 visas a year to random applicants from around the world.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suspended the program. On Wednesday, a Biden-appointed judge in California ordered it restarted.
U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, sitting in the Southern District of California, ruled that the Trump administration must reopen Fiscal Year 2027 registration for the diversity visa lottery. Per the court order, registration must open by October 18 and remain available through November 19. The State Department — which Rubio leads — is the named defendant.
The lawsuit was brought by Red Eagle Law, a California immigration firm, on behalf of prospective lottery applicants. Their argument is procedural: the administration didn't follow the right steps to suspend the program. The dead don't get a procedural argument.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program distributes over 50,000 green cards annually through a literal random drawing. No skill requirement. No employment sponsorship. No family connection needed. The program exists because Congress decided in 1990 that immigration policy should include a slot machine. Rubio shut it down after a lottery visa recipient murdered people at two of America's most prestigious universities, which would seem like the kind of event that warrants at least a pause.
Judge Ohta's ruling doesn't engage with any of that. The order treats the suspension as an administrative action that failed to follow proper notice-and-comment procedures. It treats the lottery as a bureaucratic entitlement that the executive branch interrupted without filing the right paperwork. The shootings at Brown and MIT don't change the procedural calculus — not in this courtroom, anyway.
The firms that brought the suit specialize in immigration cases. Their clients want lottery slots. The judge gave them what they wanted on process grounds, which is how these cases always work: you don't have to win the policy argument if you can win the paperwork argument. The merits of randomly distributing 55,000 permanent residency cards to people with no ties to the country never come up.
Rubio's State Department suspended the program in direct response to a national security event — a mass shooting by a diversity visa recipient at two American universities. The court's position is that the response needed more bureaucratic process before it could take effect. The registration window the judge ordered — October 18 through November 19 — means the lottery moves forward on the court's timeline, not the administration's.
Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente entered the United States through a random drawing. He killed people at Brown University and MIT. The program that let him in reopens in two days.