President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the immediate suspension of the diversity immigrant visa lottery program after authorities identified the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings as a Portuguese national who entered the United States through the program in 2017.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the suspension in a post on the social platform X, saying she had directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program at Trump's direction.

"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," Noem said of the suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. "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."

Neves Valente was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, following a nearly week-long manhunt. Authorities said he was the prime suspect in the December 13 mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, as well as the December 15 fatal shooting of MIT nuclear science professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Suspect's immigration history

According to an affidavit from a Providence police detective, Neves Valente first entered the United States on a student visa in 2000 to attend Brown University's graduate physics program. He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrew from the Ivy League institution in 2003.

His whereabouts between leaving the school and 2017 remain unclear to investigators. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent resident status through the green card.

His last known address was in Miami, Florida.

The two students killed in the Brown University shooting were identified as Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. Loureiro, the MIT professor, was 47 years old and had attended the same academic program in Portugal as Neves Valente, according to Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

Authorities have not disclosed a motive for either shooting.

How the diversity visa program works

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, established by the Immigration Act of 1990, makes up to 50,000 green cards available annually through a random lottery selection process. The program prioritizes applicants from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States.

To qualify, applicants must have at least a high school education or two years of work experience in certain occupations. Winners are then invited to apply for a green card and must undergo the same vetting process and interviews at U.S. consulates as other green card applicants.

Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses. Portuguese nationals received 38 slots.

The program was designed to broaden the demographics of immigrants coming to the United States beyond traditional sending nations in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

In 2020, nearly 15 million applications covering more than 23 million people were filed. Nearly 1.7 million of those applications came from Uzbekistan—about 5 percent of that country's total population—and another 950,000 came from Sierra Leone, representing more than 10 percent of its population.

Trump's longstanding opposition to the lottery

The suspension marks the latest effort by Trump to end or curtail the diversity visa program, which he has targeted since his first term in office.

Noem noted in her announcement that Trump had previously sought to eliminate the program in 2017 following an Islamic State-inspired attack in Lower Manhattan. In that incident, 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 had entered the country through the diversity visa lottery.

Saipov was convicted in January 2023 of murder and other counts and sentenced to eight life terms plus 260 years in prison.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for the FBI in December 2017, Trump called on Congress to "end the visa lottery system."

"They have a lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No," Trump said at the time. "What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people."

Trump included ending the lottery as part of his 2018 proposal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrant "Dreamers" in exchange for border wall funding and new limits on family-based migration. He also suspended admissions from the lottery as a pandemic measure in 2020, an order that President Joe Biden revoked in 2021.

Legal questions and criticism

The suspension is almost certain to invite legal challenges. The diversity visa lottery was created by Congress, and it remains unclear whether the president has the authority to unilaterally suspend a program established by statute.

The law appears to require that the lottery still take place, though the administration claims the president has power to refuse to admit the winners. Of the 50,000 annual approvals, most recipients are outside the United States, but several thousand are typically already in the country in some less permanent immigration status. The suspension would appear to block them from obtaining a green card but would not automatically revoke their current status.

Immigration advocates criticized the move as disproportionate.

"The perpetrator in these horrific attacks should face justice under the law—but it's unjust to block the legal immigration processes of tens of thousands of people who have absolutely nothing to do with this offense, except that they happened to have applied for the same type of visa," said Myal Greene, president of World Relief.

Greene said Trump's action represents "the latest instance of the administration leveraging an isolated evil action to advance its goal of dramatically reducing legal immigration."

"In doing so, it is circumventing Congress, harming our national economy and penalizing law-abiding individuals who have waited patiently abroad in one of the limited lines available to immigrate lawfully under the law," Greene added.

Pattern of immigration restrictions following attacks

The diversity visa suspension follows a pattern in which the Trump administration has broadly restricted immigration pathways in response to violent incidents involving foreign nationals.

In November, an Afghan national was arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration responded by placing a hold on all pending asylum applications and pausing all pending immigration cases by foreign nationals from 19 countries deemed "high risk" under Trump's travel ban.

Trump also halted the processing of any visas for Afghanistan specifically, effectively ending the pathway for Afghans who aided American war efforts to come to the United States.

The administration has simultaneously pursued efforts to limit or eliminate other avenues to legal immigration, including a challenge to birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear.