President Donald Trump on Thursday suspended the green card lottery program that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on the social platform X that she was ordering U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to suspend the program at Trump’s direction.
“This heinous man should never have been allowed into our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in a shooting at Brown University that left two students dead, nine injured and an MIT professor killed. He was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday night, officials said.
According to an affidavit from a Providence police detective, Neves Valente began studying at Brown University in 2000 on a student visa. In 2017, he obtained a diversity immigrant visa and obtained lawful permanent residence status a few months later, the affidavit states. It is unclear what happened between when he asked for leave from the school in 2001 and when he obtained his visa in 2017.
The Diversity Visa Program provides up to 50,000 green cards each year through a lottery to people from countries with little representation in the United States, many of which are in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, a move that will almost certainly trigger legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected, including spouses of winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting before entering the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 places.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for green cards. They are interviewed at the consulate and are subject to the same requirements and scrutiny as other green card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. The Trump administration imposed sweeping rules on immigrants from Afghanistan and other counties after an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a deadly attack on National Guard members last November.
While pursuing mass deportations, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate pathways to legal immigration. He wouldn’t be deterred if they were enshrined in law, like a diversity visa lottery, or in the Constitution, like citizenship rights for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
