President Donald Trump on Thursday suspended a federal green card lottery program after authorities confirmed that the suspect in the deadly shootings at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor entered the United States through the program.
"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said, announcing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would pause the program at Trump’s discretion. Investigators identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who obtained a green card through the diversity visa lottery in 2017, according to the Boston Globe.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected of killing two Brown University students, wounding nine others, and murdering an MIT professor before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to authorities.
Court documents show Neves Valente first entered the United States on a student visa in 2000, allowing him to attend Brown, and later secured permanent legal status through the lottery program. Officials have said it remains unclear where he lived during the years between leaving Brown and obtaining his green card. He also had ties to the slain MIT professor—both studied physics and attended the same Lisbon university.
The diversity visa program, known as DV1, distributes up to 50,000 green cards annually to applicants from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Trump has long condemned the lottery as a security risk, arguing that it admits foreign nationals through random selection rather than merit-based screening.
The program became the subject of criticism in 2017 after 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who entered the United States on a diversity visa, killed eight people and injured dozens more when he drove a truck down a bicycle path in New York City. He was later revealed to have ties to ISIS.
"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," Noem said.
"At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program."
