In a sweeping policy move directly linking immigration to domestic terrorism, President Donald Trump has suspended the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery—the famed “green card lottery“—after it was revealed the suspected gunman in the Brown University mass shooting entered the country through the program in 2017.
The dramatic suspension, announced by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, explicitly ties the fate of a visa program that grants 50,000 permanent residencies annually to a pair of high-profile atrocities: the Ivy League shooting that left two students dead and the earlier murder of an MIT professor. “We will ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme,” Noem declared on social media.
A Program With a ‘Disastrous’ History
Noem framed the suspension as the culmination of a long crusade, noting that Trump “fought to end” the program back in 2017. That year, Uzbekistan national Sayfullo Saipov—an Islamic State supporter now serving life sentences for killing eight people in a New York City truck-ramming attack—also entered the U.S. through the DV lottery.
The suspect in the Brown attack, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday in a New Hampshire storage unit from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after a six-day manhunt. He had been a PhD physics student at Brown for less than a year over two decades ago and had “no current active affiliation” with the school.
Investigators now believe Valente was responsible for a second, chilling crime: the execution-style murder of MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home just two days after the campus rampage. Police revealed a haunting connection: both the professor and the shooter had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s. Authorities linked the cases through the suspect’s vehicle, caught on CCTV at both crime scenes.
No motive has been provided for either attack, which claimed the lives of Ella Cook, 19, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American freshman.
Why This Matters
The suspension of the Diversity Visa Lottery is more than an immigration adjustment; it is a potent political symbol. The Trump administration is directly leveraging national grief and fear to achieve a long-standing policy goal: ending a program it has labeled a security threat.
Critics will argue it scapegoats a broad, legal immigration pathway for the actions of isolated individuals. Supporters will see it as a necessary, if brutal, reckoning with a system they believe has failed. For the 50,000 hopefuls around the world who enter the lottery each year, the “American Dream” has now been officially put on hold—indefinitely—by the violence of a single man who once won it.
