Earlier this week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Biden Administration to issue 9,095 diversity visas awarded through the random visa lottery from FY 2020.
This decision means that nearly ten thousand foreign nationals will be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. through the completely random allotment of visas, despite a possible lack of merit or familial connection in the U.S.
The Immigration Act of 1990 established the Diversity Visa program, usually referred to as the visa lottery, making available 55,000 immigrant visas starting in 1995. The lottery “aims to diversify the immigrant population in the United States, by selecting applicants mostly from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States in the previous five years.” Natives of countries that have sent less than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years are eligible for the visa lottery.
Visa lottery visas were included as part of President Trump’s life-saving April 2020 proclamation, which halted the processing of most new immigration during the coronavirus pandemic. However, on September 30, 2020, Judge Mehta of the U.S. District Court ordered the reservation of 9,095 lottery visas from the 55,000 offered in 2020. This week, Judge Mehta has ruled that those unused visas will be awarded to randomly selected foreign nationals with no consideration given to merit or what they can contribute to American communities.
Judge Mehta found “that the government’s policy of refusing to process DV-2020 applications was unlawful; that the government inappropriately excluded DV-2020 applicants from expedited, “mission-critical” visa processing; and that the government unreasonably delayed and withheld adjudication of DV-2020 applications.” According to a source familiar with the decision, “The parties are in the process of negotiating a timeline for issuing the visas.”
You can read the full ruling here.
