President Trump ordered the suspension late Thursday of the visa lottery program used by the suspect in the killing of two Brown University students and a MIT professor to gain entry to the US.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a late-night statement on X. “At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
Portugal native Claudio Neves Valente, 48, was issued a Diversity Immigrant (DV1) Visa in 2017 and obtained a green card months later.
Neves Valente was found dead Thursday evening of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem, NH. He was the prime suspect in the Dec. 13 mass shooting that killed Brown students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and wounded nine others, as well as the Dec. 15 murder of MIT nuclear science professor Nuno Loureiro.
The suspect enrolled in a graduate physics program at Brown during the 2000-01 school year, taking a leave of absence that April and formally withdrawing from the Ivy League university in 2003.
It’s unclear where Neves Valente lived or what he was doing between 2017 and Saturday’s shooting at Brown. His last known address was in Miami, Fla.
The DV1 program, authorized by the Immigration Act of 1990, provides up to 50,000 visas annually using a formula to prioritize applicants from countries with low levels of emigration to the US over the previous five years.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 winners and spouses selected.
Portuguese nationals received 38 slots.
Trump previously called for an end to the program following a 2017 attack in Lower Manhattan, when Uzbekistan national Sayfullo Saipov killed eight people and injured 11 others when he drove a pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River.
Saipov was convicted in January 2023 of murder and other counts and sentenced to eight life terms plus 260 years.
