by Natalia Mittelstadt
The Trump administration has suspended the country’s green card lottery program that was used by the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on X late Thursday, “The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people. 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.”
The visa lottery was established by Congress, so it is unclear whether Trump has the power to suspend it, according to The Hill news outlet.
Two students were killed, and nine others were injured in the Saturday shooting at Brown University. Valente, who was found dead Thursday night, is believed to be the shooter and the same person who fatally shot an MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro.
Valente, 48, was a Portuguese national and a student at Brown. His last known address was in Miami, Florida.
Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, said they believe the suspect attended the same academic program in Portugal as Loureiro.
The green card lottery program was established in the Immigration Act of 1990. The lottery program, also known as the Diversity Lottery, it “aims to diversify the immigrant population in the United States, by selecting applicants mostly from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States in the previous five years,” according to the federal government.
Applicants to the program had to complete the equivalent of a high school education.
The program issued 50,000 visas to foreigners who applied.
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Photo “Kristi Noem” by Kristi Noem.
