The Trump administration has suspended the Diversity Immigrant Visa, or green card lottery, program after the suspect in the Brown University shooting was identified as a Portuguese national who had entered the United States through the scheme. BBC reported that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the pause was ordered under President Donald Trump’s direction.
The suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, was found dead after a six-day manhunt and is believed by officials to have killed two people at Brown University and MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. BBC said Valente entered the US through the DV1 program in 2017 and later received a green card. The administration is now using the case to argue that the visa lottery needs to be reviewed urgently.
Noem said she paused the program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by what she called a disastrous programme. The BBC report noted that the scheme makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through random selection among applicants from countries with low immigration rates to the United States. The government’s decision immediately puts one of the country’s main diversity-based immigration pathways on hold.
The shooting itself was devastating. Two students were killed and nine others injured when a gunman entered Brown University’s engineering building on 13 December during final exams. BBC identified the victims as Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18. The manhunt ended when Valente was found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, with a satchel and two firearms.
Authorities say the Brown case was linked to the earlier killing of Loureiro, a 47-year-old professor at MIT, through vehicle identification and CCTV evidence. BBC said police found the suspect’s car rental details after public tips and video review, then matched the vehicle to scenes in both investigations. Officials have not yet given a motive for either attack.
The suspension of the lottery scheme is politically significant because the program has been a recurring target in immigration debates for years. Noem referenced Trump’s opposition to the scheme in 2017 after an attack in New York by an Uzbek national who had entered through the same channel. The administration is now tying that long-running political argument to the Brown investigation.
For immigrants and applicants already in the pipeline, the move introduces uncertainty. For the government, it is a rapid policy response to a violent case that has drawn national attention and renewed debate over who is admitted and how the system screens applicants.
