US halts green card lottery following Brown, MIT shootings

On December 18, U.S. President Donald Trump suspended the Diversity Visa lottery programme that allowed the suspect in recent shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to enter the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she was ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the programme, American news agency reports.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected of the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, as well as the killing of an MIT professor. Officials said he was found dead on December 18 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said Neves Valente obtained legal permanent residence status in 2017.

The diversity visa programme makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are underrepresented in the United States, many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the suspension is likely to face legal challenges.

Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected, including spouses of winners. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots. Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card and are interviewed at U.S. consulates, undergoing the same vetting as other green-card applicants.

Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement follows a pattern of using tragic incidents to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, the Trump administration imposed sweeping restrictions on immigration from Afghanistan and other countries.

While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration, including those enshrined in law, such as the diversity visa lottery, or in the Constitution, like birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.

By Aghakazim Guliyev