Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced late Thursday that the Trump administration will pause the diversity visa lottery program, citing its use by a man now accused of carrying out deadly shootings at Brown University and near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said in a post on X. “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 said the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 2017 and was issued a green card. Authorities believe Neves Valente was responsible for the killing of two Brown University students and, two days later, the fatal shooting of an MIT professor in suburban Boston. He was found dead by suicide in a storage unit in New Hampshire late Thursday, officials said.
Brown University’s Barus and Holley engineering building remained closed on Thursday night.
The diversity visa lottery program, created by Congress in the 1990s, makes up to 50,000 visas available each year to applicants from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. Applicants are selected randomly and must meet education or work experience requirements, undergo background checks, and complete interviews before receiving a visa. Tens of millions of people apply annually.
It remains unclear what legal authority the Department of Homeland Security has to unilaterally pause the program. Most diversity visas are processed by the State Department, though a smaller number are handled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which falls under DHS, for applicants already in the country.
President Trump has long criticized the diversity visa lottery, arguing that it poses security risks and prioritizes randomness over merit. He called for its elimination during his first term, particularly after a diversity visa recipient carried out a deadly truck-ramming attack in New York City. Supporters of the program counter that recipients are thoroughly vetted and say the visas benefit the U.S. economy and bolster America’s standing abroad.
The first Trump administration suspended the diversity visa program in 2020 as part of broader immigration restrictions tied to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Former President Joe Biden reinstated the program in 2021.
Neves Valente, 48, was a Portuguese national whose last known residence was in Miami, according to officials. Court documents show he first entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2000 to attend graduate school at Brown University. Brown’s president said Neves Valente studied there briefly before taking a leave of absence in 2001 and formally withdrawing two years later.
