President Donald Trump has decided to suspend the permanent resident card (“green card”) lottery program, better known as the Visa Lottery, under which the suspect in the Brown University attack entered the United States.
This Diversity Visa Program (DV1) facilitates residency for people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
Visa Lottery Suspended
The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.
In 2017, President Trump…
– Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) December 19, 2025
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem indicated this Friday on her X account that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national from Portugal, entered the United States through DV1 in 2017 and received a green card.
Noem stressed that, at Trump’s direction, he was “immediately” instructing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to suspend the DV1 plan “to ensure that no other Americans are affected by this disastrous program.”
Neves Valente’s body was found lifeless on Thursday, December 18, in a warehouse in Salem, New Hampshire, and officials said that day that he committed suicide.
Police are looking into possible connections between the Dec. 13 Brown University shooting that killed two students and the murder of renowned professor and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Nuno Loureiro, who died Tuesday in a hospital after being shot a day earlier at his home near Boston.
The USCIS website reminds that the Diversity Visa Program, administered by the U.S. Department of State, annually makes available 50,000 diversity visas, randomly selected from applicants’ applications.
Most winners reside outside the United States and immigrate through the consular process with the issuance of an immigrant visa, but each year there are a small number of winners who, at the time of winning the lottery, are already living in the United States as non-immigrants or have another legal status.
Winners must then apply for a permanent resident card (“green card“) for immigrants and are subject to the same requirements and controls as other applicants for such cards.
With information from EFE
