In a swift and controversial move, the Trump administration has suspended the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program—commonly known as the green card lottery—citing national security concerns linked to the suspect in a recent mass shooting at Brown University and the subsequent murder of an MIT professor.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced late Thursday that, at President Trump’s direction, she has instructed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to immediately pause the program. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in a post on X, referring to the suspect, 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. She described the lottery as a “disastrous program” that must be halted “to ensure no more Americans are harmed.”
The decision comes just hours after authorities confirmed Valente’s death by suicide in a New Hampshire storage facility, ending a multi-state manhunt and closing the chapter on a series of attacks that left three dead and nine injured.
The violence began on December 13, when a gunman opened fire inside the Barus and Holley physics building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Two students were killed, and nine others wounded in what police described as a targeted assault during a classroom review session. Two days later, on December 15, MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro—a Portuguese national and prominent nuclear fusion scientist—was fatally shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Investigators quickly linked the crimes through ballistic evidence, surveillance footage, and vehicle tracking. Valente, who had rented a car in Boston and was seen in the vicinity of both crime scenes, became the prime suspect. On Thursday evening, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez announced that Valente had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “There is no longer a threat to the public,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston stated.
Valente’s connection to the institutions ran deep. He initially entered the United States in 2000 on a student visa to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at Brown, enrolling in the program but withdrawing after less than a year, taking a leave of absence before formally dropping out in 2003. Brown University President Christina H. Paxson confirmed he had spent significant time in the very building where the shooting occurred. Authorities also noted that Valente and Loureiro attended the same university in Lisbon, Portugal, years earlier, though no clear motive has been established for the attacks.
Immigration records reveal Valente obtained lawful permanent resident status—a green card—in 2017 through the Diversity Visa Program. He had applied while listing Brown as his educational institution and candidly noting his dropout status on forms.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, established by Congress in 1990, annually allocates up to 55,000 visas (adjusted to around 50,000-52,000 in recent years) through a random lottery to applicants from countries with historically low immigration rates to the U.S., including many in Africa and Europe. For the DV-2025 cycle, nearly 20 million people applied worldwide, with over 131,000 selected including family members. The program has long been a target of criticism from President Trump, who in 2017 sought its elimination after a terrorist attack in New York City involving a diversity visa recipient.
Noem echoed this history in her announcement, recalling Trump’s earlier efforts to end the program following the 2017 NYC truck ramming that killed eight people.
Legal experts anticipate challenges to the suspension, as the program is enshrined in law and primarily administered by the Department of State, with USCIS handling only a portion of adjustments for those already in the U.S. Critics argue the move exploits a tragedy to advance long-standing anti-immigration priorities, while supporters praise it as a necessary step to close perceived security loopholes.
As the nation mourns the victims and grapples with yet another episode of gun violence on a college campus, the suspension marks an early and aggressive use of executive authority in Trump’s new term to reshape legal immigration pathways.
