Noem: Brown University Shooter Entered through Visa Lottery

If federal, state, and local authorities are correct, the shooter who killed two students and wounded nine at Brown University last Saturday has been identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who entered as a nonimmigrant student and later received a green card through under the Diversity Visa (DV) Program — that is, the “visa lottery”, which the Trump administration quickly put on hold. It’s time to end the lottery, once and for all.

The Shooting

Around 4:00 PM on December 13, a man dressed in black entered a classroom in Barus and Holley Hall at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and began shooting.

By the time he left, two Brown students were dead — Ella Cook, a sophomore from Birmingham, Ala., and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman who immigrated as a child from Uzbekistan and became a U.S. citizen in 2011 — and nine were injured.

The next morning, authorities announced a “person of interest” was in custody, but he was quickly released that night. By Monday, officials had released three videos and two photographs of a different suspect. The manhunt stretched on until Thursday, with speculation swirling in all directions.

MIT Professor Killed

While the search for the Brown University shooter was ongoing, local police on December 15 responded to a different shooting, this one about an hour away in Brookline, Mass.

The victim, who died the next day, was Nuno Loureiro, originally from Portugal.

Prof. Loureiro was a faculty member in the Nuclear Science & Engineering and Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Loureiro had “majored in physics at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) in Portugal and obtained a PhD in physics at Imperial College London in 2005”, before moving to Princeton University in New Jersey to do postdoctoral work.

For the next nine years he moved between IST and a research center of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in Culham, England, eventually returning to MIT in 2016. Last year, he was tapped to run MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente

The two crimes were thought to be unrelated until Thursday, when authorities announced they had obtained an arrest warrant for a suspect.

At 9 o’clock that night, officers approached and broke into a storage locker in nearby Salem, N.H. Inside, they found the 48-year-old Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted wound.

Less than three hours later, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tweeted:

The Diversity Visa Lottery

As USCIS explains:

The [DV Program] makes up to 50,000 immigrant visas available annually, drawn from random selection among all entries to individuals who are from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. The DV Program is administered by the U.S. Department of State (DOS).

Most lottery winners reside outside the United States and immigrate through consular processing and issuance of an immigrant visa.

There are, however, a small number of lottery winners each year who, at the time of “winning the lottery,” are residing in the United States in a nonimmigrant or other legal status. For these winners residing inside the United States, USCIS processes adjustment of status applications.

“Ideal for Terrorists”

The DV Program was established in 1990 “ to promote immigration from countries underrepresented in the United States”, and at this point it is a dangerous relic of a bygone age.

Most foreign nationals participate in the visa lottery expressly because that they have no other ties to the United States — no family and no job here — and to the degree it ever made any sense to put strangers to this country on a path to citizenship through pure blind luck, subsequent threats posed by foreign actors in the interim should have shown how dangerous the program was.

As my colleague Steven Camarota told Congress in 2004:

Ordinary fraud is bad enough, but after the September 11^th attacks, immigration fraud of any kind poses a dire security threat. We must remember that the lottery does not draw people randomly from around the globe. Winners come disproportionately from countries that were part of the special registration system for temporary visitors set up by DHS after 9/11. All observers agree that these countries are of special concern in the war against Islamic extremism. And about a third of winners come from those countries.

Camarota continued:

The lottery is ideal for terrorists because it encourages immigration from those parts of the world where fraud is common, documents are difficult to verify, and al Qaeda is very active. Moreover, it allows people into the country with no family or other significant connections to the United States. Again, this is tailor-made for someone wishing to attack our country. While there are other ways to enter the country, a green card is far more valuable to terrorists than a temporary visa such as those for tourists or students. A green card lets a person stay in the country indefinitely and this gives terrorists the time they may need to plan a sophisticated plot. Moreover, permanent residency allows the recipient to work at almost any job they like, get a licen[s]e to handle hazardous material, and to travel to and from the United States as often as they please. If one were to set out to design a visa that was ideal for terrorists, the visa lottery system would be it.

If you don’t trust Camarota, how about then-State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard, who told to Congress in 2005 that his office had concluded the DV program “contains significant risks to national security from hostile intelligence officers, criminals, and terrorists attempting to use the program for entry into the United States as permanent residents”.

By the way, you can add to this list of terrorists who exploited the DV lottery Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbekistan national who “plowed into a crowd of bicyclists and pedestrians just blocks away from the World Trade Center” on Halloween 2017.

Shortly thereafter, in November 2017, my colleague Mark Krikorian explained why the visa lottery should be abandoned.

And yet until last night the DV program chugged along as it has for 35 years, maintained and protected by entrenched D.C. interests who oppose ending any program that brings aliens to the United States, no matter how useless, senseless, or dangerous it has proven to be.

At this point, authorities have no idea why Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente went on a killing spree, attacking so many promising and accomplished young people. But we know he got here through the Diversity Visa Program, a “lottery” that benefits few but threatens many.