President Donald Trump has ordered the suspension of the US diversity visa lottery programme, days after authorities identified the suspect in a deadly shooting at Brown University as a Portuguese national who entered the country through the scheme.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the pause on Thursday, stating that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, had obtained a green card via the Diversity Immigrant Visa programme (DV1) in 2017. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote on social media, adding that the move followed Trump’s direction to ensure no further harm from the “disastrous programme”.
Neves Valente, a former Brown PhD student who withdrew from the university in 2003, was found dead on Thursday in a New Hampshire storage unit from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Authorities said he was responsible for killing two students and injuring nine others during a mass shooting at Brown’s engineering building on 13 December, as well as the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro two days later.
The diversity visa programme allocates up to 55,000 green cards annually through a lottery to applicants from countries with low US immigration rates. Trump, a longstanding critic, sought to end it during his first term after a 2017 New York attack by an Uzbek entrant. The latest suspension is expected to face legal challenges, as the programme is established by Congress.
Investigators linked Neves Valente to the crimes through surveillance footage, a rented car, and public tips. He initially entered the US on a student visa in 2000 and had studied at the same Portuguese university as Loureiro in the 1990s. No motive has been established.
The Brown victims were identified as Ella Cook, 19, from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American freshman. Loureiro, 47, a prominent plasma physicist, was shot at his Brookline home.
The decision underscores the Trump administration’s renewed focus on restricting legal immigration pathways, amid broader enforcement efforts.
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