White House suspends green card lottery program after Brown shooting

by · UPI

Dec. 19 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump ordered the green card lottery be suspended Friday after it was revealed the Portuguese suspect in the Brown University shooting, in which two students were killed, entered the United States via the program.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a post on X, said the so-called diversity lottery immigrant visa scheme had been paused at the direction of Trump "to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program."

Noem said the suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, came to the United States through the DV1 program in 2017 and was granted a green card.

"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," she said.

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Noem said she had instructed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials to discontinue the DV1 program, with immediate effect.

The scheme allocates as many as 50,000 visas a year to applicants from countries with low rates of immigration, selecting them randomly in a lottery-style draw.

The move came just hours after Neves Valente was found dead Thursday night in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot, bringing to an end a massive five-day manhunt involving federal, state and local law enforcement.

The Brown graduate school dropout opened fire inside the university's engineering faculty auditorium, killing Ella Cook, 19, of Birmingham, Ala., and Uzbek-American Muhammad Aziz Umurzakov, 18, and injuring nine others before making his escape.

Neves Valente is also the main suspect in Monday's fatal shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, who was also Portuguese-born, at his suburban Boston home two days after the attack at Brown in Providence, R.I.

Loureiro and Neves Valenta were students at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s.

Noem noted that Trump had first attempted to revoke the scheme after a 2017 ISIS terror attack in New York in which a man who entered the United States from Uzbekistan under the DV1 program seven years previously used a rented truck to murder eight people.

Sayfullo Saipov was sentenced to eight life terms for murder in May 2023 plus 260 years for 18 attempted murders, after being convicted in a trial in January 2023 in which the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on sentencing him to death.

Since re-entering the White House for his second term in January, Trump has made several efforts to restrict entry by immigrants and foreign nationals, many of whom he claims are criminals, militants, or mentally ill, most recently a Nov. 28 travel ban on all "Third World Countries" after the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C.

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