President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering US Citizenship and Immigration Services to stop the program.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese citizen Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is a suspect in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained lawful permanent resident status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year through a lottery to people from countries that are underrepresented in the United States, most of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Almost 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with winners. After winning, they must pass an exam to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at the consulates and subject to the same requirements and verification 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. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a deadly attack on National Guard members in November, the Trump administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues for legal immigration. He has not been discouraged if they are enshrined in the law, such as the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, such as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on the soil of the United States. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.