President Donald Trump has suspended the US green card lottery scheme following a deadly shooting at Brown University that left two students dead and raised renewed scrutiny of the visa programme.
The decision came after authorities confirmed that the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, entered the United States through the diversity immigrant visa programme in 2017 and was later granted permanent residency. Valente, 48, was found dead on Thursday in New Hampshire in what police believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she paused the programme at Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme.” Writing on social media, she said Trump had long opposed the scheme and previously sought to end it following a deadly truck-ramming attack in New York City in 2017.
The diversity visa lottery makes up to 50,000 green cards available annually through a random selection process for applicants from countries with historically low immigration rates to the US.
US officials also believe Neves Valente was responsible for the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro earlier this week. Loureiro, 47, was shot dead at his home in Brookline, around 50 miles from Providence, Rhode Island.
Investigators linked the two cases after identifying the suspect’s rental car on CCTV footage near both crime scenes. Following a six-day manhunt across multiple states, police located Valente’s body in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, alongside two firearms and a satchel. Evidence recovered from a nearby vehicle was matched to the Brown University shooting, according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
Brown University president Christina Paxson said Valente had studied for a PhD in physics at the university during the 2000–2001 academic year but had no current affiliation with the institution.
The mass shooting occurred on 13 December when a gunman opened fire inside Brown’s engineering building during final exams. Two students, Ella Cook, 19, from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American freshman, were killed. Nine other people were injured.
Erizia Rubyjeana
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