President Donald Trump is moving ahead to implement changes to the Diversity Immigration Visa Program that he has claimed is ripe with fraud and brings in the “worst of the worst” to the United States.

The DV program provides a lottery for about 50,000 global applicants annually to be admitted to the country and receive a green card as a Lawful Permanent Resident.

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The Trump administration targeted the lottery during its first term, but the program evaded reforms after proposed policies were overturned in court in 2022.

This year, the State Department delayed the application process until this fall and has not publicly disclosed when it is expected to begin.

“The Diversity Visa (DV) program is established by statute, and the Department of State will continue to implement the program as required by law,” a State spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “This year, there will be changes to the DV entry process. We will announce registration dates and other details when available.”

An immigration attorney who spoke with the Washington Examiner estimated that the lottery is expected to open around Oct. 16, a couple of weeks later than normal due to recent changes that will be implemented this time around.

On Aug. 5, the Trump administration proposed a regulation that would require lottery applicants to have a valid passport at the time of applying.

On Sept. 16, the Trump administration announced that it would impose a $1 registration fee for all applicants in addition to the passport requirement, according to Zjantelle Cammisa Markel, who founded a New York-based immigration law firm. “That would take effect in 30 days. So that brings us to October 16th,” said Cammisa Markel.

Cammisa Markel warned that the start date could be delayed further if the changes are challenged.

The 2019 attempt to rework the DV program received so much pushback that the Trump administration has gone about changing it in new ways this time around.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the $1 fee per applicant may sound insignificant, but it will have a massive effect. The 2024 lottery received more than 24 million applications.

“Typically, there are millions of applicants, so the entry fee should raise a good sum of money up front,” Vaughan wrote in an email. “The State Dept. is also hoping that the $1 entry fee will help deter a lot of bogus entries by bad actors seeking to game the system. I’m not sure it will help that much, since it’s only a dollar, but it might help weed out duplicate entries if they can track the credit cards or accounts used for the payments.”

In 2017, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called for a review of this lottery on the basis that it “has been used by foreign terrorists, human traffickers and fraudsters to immigrate permanently” to the U.S., his office said in a press release at the time. Grassley’s concerns came in the wake of the discovery that the suspect behind an Oct. 31, 2017, terrorist attack in New York City was a lottery winner.

Trump had already been skeptical of immigration protocols, but increasingly called for legal immigration systems such as the lottery to be overhauled.

“They put names in a hopper. They’re not giving you their best names; common sense means they’re not giving you their best names. They’re giving you people that they don’t want,” Trump said in 2018. “And then we take them out of the lottery. And when they do it by hand — where they put the hand in a bowl — they’re probably — what’s in their hand are the worst of the worst.”

Cammisa Markel expects Trump’s latest passport requirement to “eliminate fraud” among applicants, but predicted that lag times for renewing a passport and applicants from unrecognized states would create legal challenges.

“This new rule could get challenged,” Cammisa Markel said. “It’s prohibiting someone who otherwise would have been able to enter the lottery from entering it now.”

The Trump administration has proposed a $1 million gold visa and previously tried to increase the cost for H-1B visa holders to bring in wealthy, educated immigrants.

Only nationals of certain countries are eligible to apply for the DV program, and more slots are made available for countries with lower immigration rates to the U.S. This year, 20 countries were not permitted to apply.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council in Washington, warned in September that new immigration regulations, including those regarding the DV program, would “significantly increase the red tape and expense of obtaining a visa for many people” and pose security concerns.

“Government collection of millions of biometric profiles of immigrants and noncitizens infringes on core civil liberties and privacy rights,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote in a post.

Vaughan maintained that the tweaks to the lottery did not go far enough.

“This is a sensible new change, but the most sensible thing would be for Congress to do away with the visa lottery altogether,” Vaughan said. “The eligibility standards are very low, there is a lot of fraud, and it has created new streams of chain migration and new aspirations for migration to the United States that never would have occurred without this program. … It’s utterly unnecessary immigration.”

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Lottery winners will be contacted in the spring if this year’s process begins later this month.

The White House did not provide a comment.