On Thursday night, December 18, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, announced that the Trump administration will suspend the Diversity Visa Lottery Program (DVI), also known as the Green Card Lottery. She stated that the suspect in the Brown University shooting entered the US through this visa program eight years ago.
“This unforgivable individual should never have been allowed to enter our country,” Noem wrote on X platform. “Under President Trump’s directive, I have immediately instructed the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the DVI program to ensure that no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
On Thursday night, Oscar Perez, the police chief of Providence, Rhode Island, announced in a press conference that the suspect in the shooting of two Brown University students and injuring nine others last Saturday was a Portuguese citizen who had attended Brown University and is now deceased. He is also the man who fatally shot a nuclear science professor at MIT on Monday night.
Noem stated that the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the US through the DVI visa program in 2017 and obtained a green card.
The DVI visa program, which began in the 1990s, offers 50,000 visas annually to people from countries with relatively low immigration to the US. Applicants are selected randomly through a lottery system, with millions competing for these visas each year.
To qualify for the Diversity Visa, applicants must have at least a high school education or two years of professional training. They are also required to undergo screening and interviews to obtain the visa.
President Trump has long criticized the DVI program, arguing that it poses security risks and does not prioritize merit-based admissions like employment-based visas do. Early in his first term, a man who obtained a DVI visa carried out a truck ramming attack in New York City, killing eight people, prompting Trump to push for the termination of the program. Supporters of the program argue that visa recipients undergo strict vetting and that the program is beneficial to the US economy and its image.
Law enforcement officials stated during a press conference on Thursday night that the investigation into the Brown University shooting has concluded as Valente committed suicide in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night.