• Suspension follows fatal university shootings as suspect was identified as a recipient
• US president’s move expected to face legal, political challenges
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has ordered the suspension of the diversity visa (DV) programme after authorities said the suspect in fatal shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had entered the United States under the scheme.
US officials said the suspension of the green card lottery would take effect immediately, though the move is expected to face legal and political challenges.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed into our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, referring to the suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately instructing US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the DV-1 programme to ensure no more Americans are harmed,” she said in a post on social media.
Authorities believe Valente carried out a shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, as well as the fatal shooting of an MIT professor at his home. He was later found dead on Thursday evening from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, bringing an end to a days-long manhunt.
According to an affidavit filed by local police, Valente began studying at Brown University in 2000 on an F-1 student visa. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and subsequently obtained lawful permanent resident status.
The affidavit said it was not immediately clear where Valente had been between taking a leave of absence from the university in 2001 and receiving the diversity visa in 2017.
The diversity visa programme allocates up to 55,000 permanent resident visas annually to applicants from countries with historically low levels of immigration to the United States.
President Trump has long criticised the programme, arguing that it undermines immigration vetting. During his first term, he called for its abolition following a 2017 truck-ramming attack in New York that killed eight people. The perpetrator in that incident had also entered the country through the diversity visa system.
US authorities said Valente was found dead at a storage facility in New Hampshire. Police recovered two firearms from the scene and said there was no indication that the suspect had any accomplices.
At a press briefing, US Attorney Leah Foley said Valente had attended the same academic programme in Portugal between 1995 and 2000 as MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was shot dead at his home in Brookline, near Boston.
Officials said no motive has yet been established for the attacks, which initially appeared unrelated and prompted heightened security concerns across elite university campuses in the region.
Investigators said the case was solved after law enforcement agencies linked financial records with surveillance footage from both crime scenes.
Brown University identified the two students killed in the campus shooting as Ella Cook, vice president of the university’s Republican Party association, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a student originally from Uzbekistan who aspired to become a neurosurgeon. Six of the wounded remain hospitalised in stable condition, while three have been discharged, Brown University President Christina Paxson said.
The shootings have renewed debate over gun violence and public safety in the United States. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 300 mass shootings — defined as incidents in which four or more people are shot — have occurred so far this year. Efforts to tighten firearm regulations continue to face strong political resistance.
Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2025
