The Trump administration has suspended the green-card lottery program used by the suspect in a mass shooting at Brown University and in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
A breakthrough in the dayslong search for the attacker who opened fire in a Brown classroom during finals last weekend led law enforcement to identify 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente as the shooter.
“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,” Noem announced late Thursday, hours after Valente was identified, referring to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Valente, according to authorities, was also responsible for the killing of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, who was shot in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the university attack. Valente was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night, law enforcement officials said at a news conference.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, known as DV1, is a green-card lottery program that allows individuals from countries with low immigration rates to apply to come to the United States. Valente was granted entrance to the U.S. under the program in 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term, according to investigators.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said in the announcement, adding that Trump wanted to end the program during his first term.
Trump pushed to end the lottery program, administered under the State Department, after a recipient killed eight people and injured 18 others by running them down with a truck on a lower Manhattan bike path.
Uzbek national Sayfullo Saipov is serving life in prison for the 2017 terror attack.
“President Trump has repeatedly tried to end the Diversity Visa,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of public affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, told MS NOW on Friday.
McLaughlin declined to respond to questions about whether the pause would become permanent, but she blamed the Biden administration for resuming DV1 visa processing after Trump paused it during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Brown and MIT shootings mark the second time in less than a month that the Trump administration has used an attack attributed to an immigrant to tighten pathways to legal immigration.
The shooting of two National Guard members in Washington just before Thanksgiving prompted the administration to halt all visa proceedings for people coming from Afghanistan. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man charged in that attack, is an Afghan national who was granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year under a program meant to help Afghans who had helped U.S. troops fight the Taliban.
The administration also issued a sweeping hold on all pending asylum applications and on immigration cases involving nationals from 19 countries Trump deemed “high risk.”
This week, the administration expanded an existing travel ban order to include five new countries, Palestine and Syria among them, and increase restrictions on 15 more that already had limits on U.S. travel. The increased restrictions and full travel bans are slated to take effect Jan. 1, according to the White House.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW.