Attorneys representing thousands of potential new visa holders are calling on federal judges to hold the Trump administration in civil contempt for allegedly defying court orders to restart a stalled Green Card lottery program.
With a Wednesday deadline fast approaching to handle thousands of remaining applications, lawyers filed the request in two federal courts – San Jose and Washington, D.C.
In addition, they are requesting that the end-of-the month deadline be extended.
“The court should compel immediate compliance,” said attorney Curtis Morrison of San Diego County, who leads the team challenging the government in the visa cases. He said a contempt sanction also should “extend the deadline for all named plaintiffs,” as well as those applicants that are part of the class action lawsuit, Medani vs. Donald J Trump.
In a court filing Monday, the Department of Justice argued that claims the government was dragging its feet and slow to respond to an August court order are not grounds for contempt.
A contempt ruling, said Nag Young Chu, the DOJ lawyer, is only valid to apply pressure for a party to do exactly what the judge already has ordered or as payback for harm.
Chu argues that none of that applies in Medani v. Trump. In the filing, he explains that the government does not want to extend the visa deadline because it breaks the law.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose will make his ruling at a 4:30 p.m. hearing on Tuesday.
The contempt motion, filed Sept. 23, comes on the heels of an initial victory by Morrison, his co-counsel Jessica Arena and three other attorneys in late August. They convinced Davila to order the federal government to resume processing and expediting applications for what’s known as the Diversity Visa (DV) program after having shut it down in December.
Another case, separate from the Northern California class action suit, involves other DV applicants who were also placed on hold. Ivanov vs Trump was filed in the Washington, D.C. federal court, and is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon.
Morrison says he represents 1,152 families as plaintiffs in the Ivanov case. The judge has been busy, as he is also handling the White House expansion case, but Morrison said he quickly set a date to decide the civil contempt allegation.
Leon told the government it has until Tuesday to respond. He has not set a date for deciding the Ivanov case.
“The government’s own figures show it is not complying with the Court’s order,” says Arena. She notes in the Northern California case that “of 1,196 named plaintiffs, only 108, about 9%, have a visa approved. In the nearly four weeks since the August 28 order, just 273 have received a new decision, and more were refused (171) than approved (102).
“More than three in four are still stuck.”
In its Monday filing, the DOJ informed the court that it completed roughly 2,582 interviews and 2,929 “visa adjudications” between Aug. 29 and Sept. 2.
Morrison, though, said that the adjudications term tell him nothing about the number of visas granted, only that they have been adjudicated.
Since its inception during the George H.W. Bush administration, the program has been responsible for more than 1.7 million immigrants coming to the U.S., said Arena. Morrison estimates that the program has provided visas to 50,000 applicants now living in San Diego.
Many of those applicants include professionals like doctors and lawyers, he said. The program, which receives millions of annual entries, is limited to processing 55,000 visas a year from countries that don’t have large numbers of visa requests, such as India and Mexico.
Morrison and the other attorneys involved with the DV case decided to accuse the Trump administration of contempt of court after finding evidence that the government was dragging its feet on hastening the processing of applications by the Wednesday deadline.
As an example, the government told the court last week that the State Department sent cables to its embassies instructing officials that they can’t process any applications until “all regional posts (embassies) complete a set of new required training to determine if the immigrants will end up dependent on government assistance,” Morrison said.
Everyone in the pipeline, including those already processed, were to be reevaluated and any embassy that hadn’t completed the new training couldn’t resume immigrant visa processing, according to Morrison. He added that despite the new instruction, appraisals of applicants’ ability to take care of themselves has always been part of the process.
Another tactic, Morrison alleged, involves an added step in the processing of visas. Once an embassy gathers information about an applicant, instead of deciding on site whether the applicant is qualified, they have to send all the paperwork through a new app created by the government.
Apparently, neither the judge nor government attorneys were aware of the app, Morrison said. “It’s now someone back in Washington” making the decision, not the embassy personnel who vetted the applicant, Morrison explained.
He believes these changes have added to the ambiguity of the program for all involved, including many embassy personnel across the world, as well as the thousands of applicants now in limbo. Morrison receives frequent updates about interactions with the embassy from his clients via Telegram.
The app is “brand new information,” Morrison says, which he and the court only learned of when the DOJ was explaining why the processing of the applications was going so slowly after the August court order.
“They don’t say who’s on the other side,” Morrison said. “It could be (Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff) Stephen Miller sitting in the White House basement right now with a phone swiping left and right and deciding what immigrants get a visa.”
Another new element is the Visa Integrity Unit, according to Morrison, who said he found out it existed after some of his clients were reinterviewed and received hand-written notices from the unit about their cases. After his clients alerted him , he said he checked but couldn’t find out anything about the unit’s duties or background.
Morrison is now warning clients around the world that if they are lucky enough to have received a diversity visa, they “should be moving heaven and earth to get to the airport and enter the U.S. on the visa before the consular officer receives a notification in the app to revoke the issued visa.”
He explained that once an individual enters the U.S. on an immigrant visa, their status as a Lawful Permanent Resident is secured.
Times of San Diego reviewed a number of court filings and transcripts in the case, including Judge Davila’s order to begin reprocessing the applicants, records from a Sept. 21 video teleconference held with Davila, the attorneys and DOJ counsel and the decision granting the plaintiffs class status.
That means that instead of the lawsuit applying only to the 577 families who are plaintiffs in the Medani vs. Trump case, the lawsuit covers all DV applicants who are in limbo in the 2026 program.
Updated 4:20 p.m. Sept. 28, 2026.
