The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, has ordered the suspension of the green card lottery program at Donald Trump’s direction, saying it allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the US.
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.
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“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said on X.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals.
After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
The DV1 visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the US, many of them in Africa.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the US. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.