Trump suspends green card lottery in wake of Brown University, MIT shootings

President Donald Trump ordered a green card lottery to be suspended, which authorities allege was used by the suspected gunman in shootings at two universities to gain entrance to the country.

Two students were killed, and nine others were injured in a shooting at Brown University last Saturday. Two days later, Nuno Loureiro, director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was found shot dead in his home, approximately three miles from the school campus.

Authorities suspect Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, of carrying out the shootings, though no motive has been determined. Valente died by suicide at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, on Thursday. Valente entered the country in 2017 through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program known as DV1.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement on social media.

Noem praised Trump in her statement, saying he “fought to end this program” in 2017 after a DV1 visa holder carried out an ISIS-style attack in Lower Manhattan that killed eight people and injured 18 others. 

“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, though it is unclear what may have barred Valente from entering in 2017.  

What is clear is that Valente had lived in the U.S. more than two decades ago. Brown University President Christina Paxson reported that Valente was enrolled in a physics Ph.D. program at Brown in the fall of 2000.

“He was not a current student, was not an employee, and did not receive a degree from the university, attending for only three semesters as a graduate student until taking a leave in 2001 and formally withdrawing effective July 31, 2003,” Paxson said in a statement on Thursday.