WASHINGTON, D.C. — In response to the tragic shootings that claimed two lives at Brown University and left a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor dead, President Donald Trump ordered the suspension of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, commonly known as the green card lottery.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday night on X that she has instructed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, citing serious national security concerns.
“The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in the post.
Noem added, “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. 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.”
Neves Valente, 48, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, earlier in the night on Thursday.
Neves Valente, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, is suspected in the shooting deaths of 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov at Brown on Saturday and in the Brookline murder of 47-year-old MIT physicist and fusion scientist Nuno Loureiro.
United States Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said Neves Valente and Loureiro previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
After officials revealed Neves Valente’s identity, Trump ordered Noem to suspend the program.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S. This year, only 38 slots were allocated to Portuguese citizens through the lottery.
Neves Valente had no criminal record in the United States prior to the shootings, according to federal officials.
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