President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered a suspension of the U.S. diversity visa lottery, a program that authorities say enabled the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to enter the country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the move on X, saying she directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program at the president’s instruction.
Referring to the suspect, Portuguese citizen Claudio Neves Valente, Noem said he should never have been permitted to enter the United States.
Neves Valente, 48, was accused of carrying out a shooting spree that left two Brown University students dead, injured nine others, and killed an MIT professor. Authorities said he died Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
According to a Providence police affidavit, Neves Valente first came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2000 to attend Brown University. He later received a diversity immigrant visa in 2017 and was granted permanent resident status several months afterward. Investigators said it remains unclear where he lived during the years between leaving Brown in 2001 and obtaining the visa.
The diversity visa program allocates up to 50,000 green cards annually through a lottery system for applicants from countries with relatively low immigration rates to the U.S., many of them in Africa. Because the program was established by Congress, the suspension is expected to face legal scrutiny.
For the 2025 lottery, nearly 20 million people applied, with more than 131,000 applicants selected when including family members. Winners must still pass extensive background checks before being admitted to the United States.
