A diversity visa lottery winner murdered two students at Brown University.
A federal judge then ordered the government to reopen that same lottery.
A panel of judges appointed by Democrats just delivered Trump a stunning win.
Sayfullo Saipov Used the Same Lottery to Kill Eight People in 2017
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just blocked a lower court's order forcing the State Department to reopen the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio paused the program in November, citing changes that needed to be made before accepting new applicants.
That pause came after Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who won a visa through the lottery, opened fire at Brown University and killed two people.
He is also tied to the murder of an MIT professor two days after the Brown attack.
This is not the first time the lottery has produced a killer.
Sayfullo Saipov entered the United States through the diversity visa program in 2010.
Seven years later, he drove a truck down a Manhattan bike path and killed eight people in the name of ISIS.
Trump called for ending the lottery after that attack and demanded a merit-based immigration system instead.
Chuck Schumer fought him on it then, and a law firm just tried to force his administration's hand on the same program now.
The Ninth Circuit Said a Law Firm Could Not Sue Over the Pause
Red Eagle Law, an immigration firm that represents visa lottery applicants, sued the State Department over the pause.
A three-judge panel ruled 3-0 that Red Eagle had no legal right to bring the case at all.
The panel included Clinton appointee Mary Margaret McKeown and Biden appointee Holly A. Thomas.
Bush appointee Norman Randy Smith wrote a separate concurrence.
The court wrote that letting Red Eagle sue over its own lost business would mean "opening the floodgates, allowing all lawyers to roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing."
Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, called the ruling a "very easy call" because the firm sued on its own behalf instead of a client's.
Even the panel that just buried Red Eagle's lawsuit would not call Rubio's pause legal.
Judges wrote plainly that they do not "endorse the Department's failure to open the lottery registration period."
They ruled anyway that a law firm has no right to drag him into court over it.
A Judge Born in South Korea Ordered the Lottery Reopened First
Before the appeals court stepped in, U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta had ordered the lottery pool reopened under a preliminary injunction.
Ohta, who was born in South Korea, is the judge whose order the Ninth Circuit just erased.
The lottery admits roughly 55,000 immigrants a year from countries with historically low rates of immigration to America.
Winners are picked at random from a pool that can include applicants from Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, and Russia.
Trump has attacked the program for years, telling lawmakers in 2018 that countries "are not giving you their best names."
Democrats Keep Defending a Lottery That Already Produced Two Killers
A random lottery with no merit screening just produced its second mass killer in a decade, and the people defending it in court are not the ones burying the victims.
Red Eagle Law was not fighting for a family waiting on a visa.
It was fighting for its own share of applicants, and three judges who owe Trump nothing shut that down cold.
Saipov's truck attack killed eight people in 2017.
Valente's rampage at Brown killed two more and left a murdered professor behind it.
Every name pulled from that lottery pool is a stranger with no background check worth trusting, and Rubio's pause is the only thing standing between that pool and the next headline.
Somewhere in next year's 55,000 names could be the next Saipov or the next Valente, and three judges who never faced a single voter almost forced Rubio to find out.
Sources:
- Elaine Mallon, "Liberal Court Delivers Immigration Win for Trump as Judge Warns of Floodgates if Law Firm Succeeded," Fox News, October 30, 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "NYC Terror Suspect Saipov a Mother's Boy Who Wanted to Come Home," Fox News, November 2017.
- Daily Wire Staff, "Foreign-Born Judge Orders Trump to Reopen Diversity Visa Lottery," Daily Wire, October 15, 2026.
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, "Red Eagle v. Rubio Ruling," U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, October 14, 2026.
- Abhishek Kambli, X Post on Red Eagle v. Rubio Ruling, X, October 2026.
