US President Donald Trump has suspended the diversity green card lottery programme, saying it allowed the suspect in the deadly Brown University and MIT shootings to enter the United States, as his administration moved to tighten legal immigration channels following the attacks.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said on X that, at Trump’s direction, she had ordered US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the programme. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said, referring to Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected of killing two students and wounding nine others in a shooting at Brown University, and of killing an MIT professor in a separate attack.
He was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said, according to news agency AP.
Court documents cited by AP show that Neves Valente first entered the US on a student visa in 2000 to study at Brown University.
He later obtained a diversity immigrant visa in 2017 and was granted lawful permanent resident status the same year. It remains unclear where he was between taking a leave of absence from Brown in 2001 and receiving the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa lottery makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year to applicants from countries underrepresented in the US, many of them in Africa.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 lottery, with just over 131,000 selected including family members, as per AP. Portuguese citizens received only 38 slots.
The programme was created by Congress, and its suspension is expected to face legal challenges.
Trump has long opposed the lottery, and Noem’s announcement marks the latest instance of using a violent incident to push immigration policy changes, reported The Guardian.
Neves Valente studied physics at Brown before withdrawing and that investigators linked him to the killing of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro through surveillance footage and vehicle records.
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