President Donald Trump’s administration has announced it will end the visa lottery program that allowed the suspect in the Brown University shooting to enter the United States.
According to the U.S. government, the lottery awards about 50,000 immigrant visas each year.
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But President Trump has long opposed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the Domestic Violence Program. On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she had directed the lottery to be canceled immediately.
She also identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who obtained a green card, a permanent residence certificate, through a lottery in 2017.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed into our country,” Noem wrote in a statement on social media.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to suspend the DV1 program to prevent further harm from this disastrous program.”
Visa lottery end campaign
Friday’s announcement is not the first time President Trump has sought to shrink the diversity visa lottery.
President Trump has long sought to narrow the path to legal immigration in the country, using crime as a pretext to do so.
Noem herself noted that President Trump “fought” to end the diversity visa lottery after the 2017 attack in New York City when a truck plowed into a crowd, killing eight people.
Speaking at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) graduation ceremony in December 2017, Trump, then in his first term as president, called on Congress to “abolish the visa lottery.”
“They have a lottery. You choose the people. Do you think the country is giving us the best people? No,” Trump said.
“What kind of system is that? They’re chosen by lottery. They give us the worst.”
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program was established in 1990 to provide applicants from underrepresented countries with access to the U.S. immigration system.
Immigrant rights advocates have long argued that the path to permanent residency is narrow for people who don’t have a spouse, relative or other person in the country to provide support.
The visa lottery can help address that need by creating an alternative route to residency.
Although the lottery system selects visa recipients at random, critics argue that obtaining U.S. residency remains a long-term process, with successful applicants still having to pass a rigorous vetting process after the lottery.
According to the American Immigration Council, the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program once accepted 55,000 applicants each year, but that number was lowered to its current level in 2000.
Suspect identified
Friday’s decision to suspend the lottery immediately came amid new details emerging about physicist Neves Valente, who was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility after a nationwide manhunt.
The search began on Dec. 13, when gunfire erupted on the campus of Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island.
The fall semester of school has ended and exam period has begun. Students in the Barth and Holy Physics Labs were taking their final exams when a suspect dressed in black entered the building and opened fire, killing two students and injuring nine others.
The physics lab was close to the edge of campus, allowing the suspect to flee on foot unnoticed.
The investigation included several false starts, and authorities quickly took a person of interest into custody, only to announce that the person had been released without charge.
Then, on November 15, law enforcement officials announced that a plasma physicist named Nuno Loureiro was found dead in his home after being shot multiple times.
Loreiro, also a Portuguese immigrant, was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly regarded scientific institution.
It was not immediately clear whether the two shootings were related, and as the investigation dragged on, authorities faced pressure to bring the Brown University shooter to justice.
But on Thursday night, authorities said they found Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and believe he was responsible for both attacks.
Neves Valente was a former doctoral student at Brown University, but did not receive a degree, and was a classmate of Loureiro’s in Portugal.
visa cancellation
President Trump’s administration has a track record of canceling visas and ending immigration programs after major attacks.
For example, on November 26, two West Virginia National Guard soldiers were shot and killed while on patrol in Washington, D.C., as part of President Trump’s crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.
The suspect in the case was identified as Rahmanullah Rakanwal, an Afghan national who worked with allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.
One of the National Guard soldiers, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, ultimately died from her wounds.
In response to the incident, President Trump announced that he would suspend all visa and asylum applications from Afghan nationals, despite protests from human rights and veterans groups.
Republican leaders also said they would pursue a “permanent suspension” of immigration from “all Third World countries.”
In response to the shooting, President Trump in June tightened entry restrictions for 19 countries he identified as “high risk,” and expanded the restrictions to 20 more countries.
President Trump has also taken targeted action to revoke the immigration status of individuals in the wake of the shootings.
After the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in September, the Trump administration announced it would revoke the visas of six foreign nationals who posted disrespectful comments or memes online about the attack. Their countries of origin ranged from Argentina to Brazil, Germany, and Paraguay.
Free speech advocates said the decision was a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression.
But the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to punish foreigners who don’t align with its policy priorities.
In response, the U.S. State Department responded, “We exclude foreign nationals who take advantage of American hospitality while celebrating the assassination of a citizen.”
The suspect in the Kirk shooting is a 22-year-old American citizen from Utah named Tyler James Robinson.
Studies have repeatedly shown that U.S.-born citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants.
