By ELLIOT SPAGAT and HALLIE GOLDEN
President Donald Trump suspended the inexperienced card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect within the Brown College and MIT shootings to return to the USA.
Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem mentioned in a publish on the social platform X that, at Trump’s route, she is ordering the USA Citizenship and Immigration Companies to pause this system.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she mentioned of the suspect, Portuguese nationwide Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected within the shootings at Brown College that killed two college students and wounded 9 others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was discovered lifeless Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officers mentioned.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a scholar visa starting in 2000, based on an affidavit from a Windfall police detective. In 2017, he was issued a range immigrant visa and months later obtained authorized everlasting residence standing, based on the affidavit. It was not instantly clear the place he was between taking a depart of absence from the varsity in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The range visa program makes as much as 50,000 inexperienced playing cards accessible every year by lottery to individuals from international locations which can be little represented within the U.S., a lot of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the transfer is sort of sure to ask authorized challenges.
Practically 20 million individuals utilized for the 2025 visa lottery, with greater than 131,000 chosen when together with spouses with the winners. After successful, they need to endure vetting to win admission to the USA. Portuguese residents gained solely 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to use for a inexperienced card. They’re interviewed at consulates and topic to the identical necessities and vetting as different green-card candidates.
Trump has lengthy opposed the range visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the most recent instance of utilizing tragedy to advance immigration coverage objectives. After an Afghan man was recognized because the gunman in a deadly assault on Nationwide Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping guidelines towards immigration from Afghanistan and different counties.
Whereas pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to restrict or get rid of avenues to authorized immigration. He has not been deterred if they’re enshrined in regulation, like the range visa lottery, or the Structure, as with a proper to citizenship for anybody born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Courtroom just lately agreed to listen to his problem to birthright citizenship.
