Trump suspends U.S. green card lottery after Brown University shooting

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she was suspending the diversity visa program, saying the man suspected of killing two students at Brown University had been granted one.

Noem posted to X late Thursday that she had instructed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the (DV1) program “to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

On Dec. 13, two students died and nine others were injured when someone opened fire at the physics building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Police later identified Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, as the suspect.

Valente was a former student at the university and had been enrolled in a Ph.D program in physics in 2000, the university’s president, Christina H. Paxson, said. Valente is also suspected of having killed MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the Brown shooting. 

Valente was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility on Thursday, Providence Chief of Police Oscar Perez said.

“There’s no longer a threat to the public,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston said in a statement after Valente’s death was confirmed.

Noem said that Valente entered the U.S. through the DV1 program in 2017 and was granted a green card. 

“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people,” she wrote on X.

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV Program) allocates up to 50,000 immigrant visas every year, according to the USCIS website.

The program is a lottery. Visas are randomly allocated to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.