Saturday, December 20, 2025 - US President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program, which allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT sho0tings to come to the United States.
Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, is
accused of bursting into a building at the Ivy League school on Dec 13 and
opening fire on students sitting exams, k!lling two and wounding nine.
He is also accused of k!lling a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two days later.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on
the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in
our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves
Valente.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa
beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police
detective.
In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months
later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit.
It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a
leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards
available each year by lottery to people from countries that are
underrepresented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created
by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery,
with more than 131,000 selected, including spouses of the winners. After
winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They
are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting
as other green-card applicants.
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