WASHINGTON (TNND) — The Trump administration is suspending the green card lottery program authorities said was used by the suspected gunman in shootings at Brown University and the home of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor to gain access to the United States.
The suspect in the shootings, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, came to the U.S. legally in 2017 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa program known as DV1, authorities said in court filings. The program allows up to 50,000 people a year from countries with a low immigration rate to the U.S. to apply to come to the country.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote on X.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was ordered to immediately “pause” the program under Trump’s direction. Trump has previously sought to have Congress terminate the visa lottery millions of people apply to each year after a truck ramming attack in New York inspired by the Islamic State killed eight people and injured 18 others.
Neves Valente is accused of killing two students and injuring 13 others on Dec. 13 after opening fire in Brown University’s engineering building. Two days later, MIT nuclear science and physics professor Nuno Loureiro was found dead in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 40 miles away from Brown. Authorities said Valente was responsible for Loureiro’s death.
Authorities said they don’t know what motivated the shootings, but Neves Valente and Loureiro attended an academic program together in Portugal and was a former student at Brown, prosecutors said during a press conference. The suspect was living in Miami before going to Boston last month.
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Neves Velente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage facility in New Hampshire on Thursday after several days of searching.
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