Trump suspends green card lottery program that allowed Brown University and MIT shootings suspect into the US
President Donald Trump is suspending the green card lottery program that allowed the man responsible for the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT professor to enter the country.
In a post to X, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the gunman, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the U.S. in 2017.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she wrote on X.
“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.”
Neves Valente, 48, shot two students and wounded nine others before killing MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. The pair had been classmates in their native Portugal, reports The New York Times.
Officials confirmed the suspect was found dead on Thursday with self-inflicted bullet wounds.
There are no outstanding suspects, FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said, adding that the agency had deployed about 500 agents to assist local authorities in the investigations.
“Even though the suspect was found dead tonight, our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered,” he said.
On Saturday, Neves Valente went to Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building and fired at students who were sitting final exams.
Authorities confirmed Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, died after being shot.
Brown confirmed that Neves Valente was enrolled at the university from 2000 to spring 2001, studying for a PhD in physics, but had no affiliation with the school at the time of the attack.
On Monday, Neves Valente shot and killed Loureiro, 47, close to his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The diversity visa program that Neves Valente was on has up to 50,000 green cards available each year. People from countries underrepresented in the United States obtain visas through a lottery.
Many of the countries are in Africa, and in 2025, nearly 20 million people applied for the visa; more than 131,000 were selected, including spouses, as winners.
Trump has long opposed the visa and other forms of immigration to the country.
In November, an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members, prompting the Trump administration to impose rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other countries.
