Trump government suspends visa lottery linked to Brown University suspect
The administration of President Donald Trump has announced an immediate suspension of the visa lottery programme that enabled the suspect in the Brown University mass shooting to enter the United States.
The programme, formally known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, allocates roughly 50,000 immigrant visas annually, according to US government data.
President Trump has long opposed the scheme. On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem disclosed that the president had instructed her to terminate the lottery without delay.
She identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who obtained permanent residency through the programme in 2017.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in a statement shared on social media.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately instructing USCIS to pause the DV1 programme to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous policy.”
Renewed Push to Dismantle the Visa Lottery
Friday’s announcement marks the latest chapter in Trump’s long-running campaign against the diversity visa lottery.
Throughout his political career, Trump has sought to constrict pathways to legal immigration, frequently citing violent crime as justification.
Noem noted that as far back as 2017, Trump attempted to dismantle the programme following a deadly truck attack in New York City that killed eight people.
Addressing FBI graduates later that year, Trump urged Congress to abolish the lottery system entirely.
“They have a lottery. You pick people,” he said. “Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No.”
“What kind of system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people.”
Established in 1990, the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme was designed to broaden access to US immigration for applicants from countries with historically low admission rates.
Immigration advocates argue that legal routes to permanent residency remain severely restricted for individuals without family ties, employers, or institutional sponsors already in the United States.
The lottery, they contend, provides one of the few alternative avenues.
While visa recipients are selected randomly, critics emphasise that the odds of success are slim, and winners must still clear extensive security and background screenings. The annual visa allocation was reduced from 55,000 to its current level in 2000, according to the American Immigration Council.
Suspect Identified as Investigation Concludes
The decision to halt the programme comes as authorities finalised details surrounding the suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, a physics researcher found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire after a nationwide manhunt.
The search began on December 13, when gunfire erupted at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The Ivy League institution was concluding its fall semester, with students sitting final examinations.
During an exam session in the Barus and Holley physics laboratory, a suspect dressed in black entered the building and opened fire, killing two students and wounding nine others.
The laboratory’s proximity to the edge of campus allowed the attacker to flee on foot without immediate detection.
Investigators initially faced setbacks, briefly detaining and releasing a person of interest before the trail went cold.
On November 15, authorities announced that Nuno Loureiro, a plasma physics scholar, had been found dead at his home with multiple gunshot wounds. Loureiro, a Portuguese immigrant, was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At the time, officials did not confirm a link between the two incidents, intensifying public pressure as the search for the Brown University shooter continued.
On Thursday night, law enforcement confirmed that Neves Valente had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was believed responsible for both attacks.
Neves Valente had previously been enrolled in a doctoral programme at Brown, though he did not complete it, and had been a classmate of Loureiro during their studies in Portugal.
Pattern of Visa Revocations After High-Profile Attacks
The Trump administration has repeatedly responded to violent incidents by revoking visas or terminating immigration programmes.
On November 26, two National Guard members were shot while patrolling Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s crime crackdown in the capital. One of them, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, later died from her injuries.
The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan national who had previously assisted allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.
In response, Trump ordered an immediate halt to visa applications and asylum requests from Afghan nationals, drawing criticism from human rights organisations and veterans’ groups.
He also called for a “permanent pause” on immigration from what he described as “all third-world countries”.
Following the incident, the administration tightened entry requirements for 19 countries previously designated as “high risk” and expanded restrictions to include 20 additional nations.
Targeted actions have also followed individual cases. After the September assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, the administration revoked visas from six foreign nationals who posted online comments or memes deemed disrespectful.
The individuals came from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and Paraguay.
Free-speech advocates condemned the move as a violation of the First Amendment, which safeguards freedom of expression.
The administration dismissed those concerns.
“Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed,” the State Department said.
The suspect in the Kirk shooting was later identified as a 22-year-old US citizen from Utah.
Multiple studies continue to show that US-born citizens commit violent crimes at higher rates than immigrants.