Trump government suspends visa lottery linked to Brown University suspect 

The administration of President Donald Trump has announced it will halt the visa lottery programme that allowed the suspect in the Brown University shooting to enter the United States.

The lottery awards approximately 50,000 immigrant visas each year, according to the US government.

But Trump has long opposed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, sometimes known as the DV Programme. On Friday, his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that he had directed her to end the lottery immediately.

She also identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who received his green card — a certificate for permanent residency — through the lottery in 2017.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in her social media statement.

“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

Campaign to end visa lottery

Friday’s announcement is not the first time Trump has sought to wind down the diversity visa lottery.

Trump has long sought to narrow the country’s pathways to legal immigration, and he has used crime as a pretext for doing so.

Noem herself pointed out that, in 2017, Trump “fought” to shut down the diversity visa lottery in the wake of an attack in New York City that saw a truck ram into a crowd of people, killing eight.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in December 2017, Trump — then in his first term as president — called on Congress to “end the visa lottery system”.

“They have a lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No,” Trump said.

“What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people.”

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme was established in 1990 to ensure applicants from underrepresented countries had access to the US immigration system.

Immigration rights advocates have long argued that pathways to permanent residency are narrow for those who do not already have a spouse, relatives or some other kind of sponsor in the country.

The visa lottery helps to answer that need, by creating an alternative route to residency.

The lottery system selects visa recipients randomly, but critics argue it remains a long-shot avenue to gain US residency, and even successful applicants must still pass a rigorous screening process after the lottery.

While the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme used to accept 55,000 applicants each year, in 2000 that number was lowered to its current level, according to the American Immigration Council.

A suspect identified

Friday’s decision to immediately suspend the lottery comes as new details emerge about Neves Valente, a physics scholar found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire after a nationwide manhunt.

The search began on December 13, when gunfire erupted on the campus of Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island.

The school’s fall semester was at its conclusion, and the exam period had begun. Students in the Barus and Holley physics laboratory were taking their end-of-course exams when a suspect, clad 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, and the suspect was able to escape on foot undetected.

The manhunt included several false starts, as authorities said they quickly detained a person of interest, only to release the individual without charges.

Then, on November 15, law enforcement officials announced that a plasma physics scholar named Nuno Loureiro had been found dead at his home, after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.

Loureiro was also a Portuguese immigrant, and he served as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly regarded science institution.

It was not immediately clear that the two shooting incidents were related, and authorities faced pressure to bring the Brown University shooter to justice, as the manhunt dragged on.

But on Thursday night, officials announced they had discovered Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and that they believed him to be responsible for both attacks.

Neves Valente had previously studied in a PhD programme at Brown, though he did not complete his degree, and he had been Loureiro’s classmate in Portugal.

Visa revocations

The administration of President Trump has a track record of revoking visas and terminating immigration programmes after high-profile attacks.

On November 26, for example, two National Guard members from West Virginia were shot while on patrol in Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s crime crackdown in the capital.

The suspect in that case was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had previously worked with allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.

One of the National Guard soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, ultimately died from her wounds.

Trump responded to the incident by announcing he was halting all visa applications and asylum requests from Afghan nationals, despite outcry from human rights and veterans groups.

The Republican leader also said he would pursue a “permanent pause” on entry for immigrants from “all third-world countries”.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the Trump White House tightened entry for 19 countries it had identified in June as “high risk” and expanded the list of restrictions to include 20 more countries.

Trump has also taken targeted actions to strip individuals of their immigration status following shootings.

After the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in September, the Trump administration announced it was yanking visas from six foreign nationals who posted disrespectful comments or memes online about the attack. They hailed from countries ranging from Argentina to Brazil, Germany to Paraguay.

Free-speech advocates said the decision was a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the freedom of expression.

But the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to boot foreign nationals that do not align with its policy priorities.

“Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed,” the US State Department wrote in response.

The suspect in the Kirk shooting is a 22-year-old US citizen named Tyler James Robinson from Utah.

Studies have repeatedly shown that US-born citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants.