Another Diversity Lottery Scandal. Ambassador Meg Whitman, What Has Your Consular Staff Wrought?

Posted on December 2, 2024

The Diversity Lottery program was created to diversify our immigrant population and give individuals the opportunity to immigrate who otherwise would not be eligible. No one can argue that the program has not achieved these objectives over the years, with hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families from around the world receiving green cards. But it has also been ravaged by scandal, usually provoked by overzealous, biased, or incompetent consular staff. The latest: consular staff at the US Embassy in Kenya, after collecting fees from DV-2024 winners from Somalia in September and causing them to incur thousands of dollars in expenses to travel to Kenya for their visa interviews, automatically denied them.

The Diversity Lottery scandals are too numerous to list here, but here is a sampling. In 2001, under the “leadership” of consular official June Kunsman, consuls at the US Embassy in Russia were deputized to engage in amateur signature comparisons: checking to see if the signature on the DV-entry “matched” the one made at their visa interviews 12-24 months later. It took the expression of consternation from the INS Forensic Laboratory Director; a class action lawsuit that we filed in Washington, D.C.; bad publicity; and a “smoking gun” – copies of the entries which showed that they could only have originated in Russia, contradicting the embassy’s allegations that friends and relatives in the US signed on behalf of the applicants - for the US Embassy in Moscow to back down and change its policy – but not before it had already denied hundreds of Russians. Not to be outdone, in 2005, the US Embassy in Warsaw baselessly accused a Ukrainian couple of a sham marriage, triggering a stroke and death of the husband on his way home from the interview.

In 2007 and 2008, the US Embassy in Uzbekistan denied Uzbek DV winners on public charge grounds by not accepting real estate in Uzbekistan as an asset. It took the intervention of the Visa Office to compel the Embassy to cease such rejections. In 2011, the Department of State cancelled the results of the selection of 22,000 DV-2012 winners after it discovered a computer program glitch which skewed selection of those who submitted their entries on the first two days of the Lottery registration period.

Continuing a history of mistreatment of Uzbek DV winners, during the first Trump Administration, Consul Hadi Deeb denied hundreds of Uzbek Diversity winners on a multitude of bogus grounds, including disqualifying an applicant for failing to include a 3 day old baby (with no legal name) in a DV entry; a single woman for failing to include her nonexistent husband in her DV entry; a family for not including a second child in their entry, a child who was stillborn; and applicants who could not answer questions in their third or fourth languages, in black letter violation of the Department of State’s own rules to deny a visa. (For those wondering, both Mr. Deeb and Ms. Kunsman were promoted by the Department of State.) During the pandemic, multiple Diversity Lottery lawsuits were filed over the administration of the program in which DOS failed to prioritize the processing of Diversity Visas, notwithstanding the “hard” “use ‘em or lose ‘em” September 30 deadline for issuing the visas.

Most recently, a DV-2024 winning family from Somalia incurred approximately $7,000 in expenses to attend an immigrant visa interview at the US Embassy in Nairobi in September. Upon arrival and after the payment of the processing fees, the consul handed them and other Somalian DV winners refusal sheets. Those refusal sheets state: “Applicants who are citizens of Somalia are advised that it is not possible for the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi to verify claimed educational or work experiences that occurred in Somalia. Without such verification, it may not be possible to process such cases to completion.” Peculiarly, the two other designated embassies for processing DV Lottery winners from Somalia - in Addis Ababa and Djibouti - process and at least attempt to verify the credentials and finalize that processing. In other words, the US Embassy in Nairobi knew in advance that it would be denying these applicants from Somalia, but nevertheless invited them to appear for their interviews anyway. When I brought this to the attention of Ambassador Meg Whitman in Kenya and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Visa Services, Julie Stufft, I received a boilerplate reply from consular staff in Nairobi. The indifference is stunning, but in light of the aforementioned instances of consular incompetence, bias, and the State Department rewarding such malfeasance and misfeasance, not shocking.

It is hoped that DV-2025 winners are treated by consular officers with respect, dignity, and fair application of the law. It is hoped that these consular-created fiascos and scandals cease once and for all.

Tags: DV-2025, DV-2012, Diversity Visa refusals, US Embassy Tashkent, US Embassy Moscow, US Embassy Warsaw, Hadi Deeb, June Kunsman, Julie Stufft, US Embassy Addis Ababa, US Embassy Djibouti, US Embassy Nairobi, sham marriage