A federal court ordered the Department of State to adjudicate more than 9,000 DV-2020 cases that were not processed before the fiscal year deadline. The case concerned the Department’s suspension of the processing and issuance of diversity visas for certain classes of foreign nationals during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly selectees of the diversity visa lottery during the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2020.
The court ordered the Department to process the DV-2020 applications in a random order until all of the reserved diversity visas have been granted. “The parties shall notify the court by August 25, 2021, whether they have agreed to a time within which to process the reserved visas. The court will issue a final order once that question is resolved,” the court said, finding that the defendants acted arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding diversity visas from mission-critical processing, and that the defendants unreasonably delayed and unlawfully withheld adjudication of their diversity visas.
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