Trump administration moves to pause diversity visa program after Brown, MIT shootings

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said late Thursday
she was suspending applications for a diversity visa program because the
man suspected of killing two Brown University students and a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor last week obtained a
green card through the program in 2017.

Noem said on social media
she was “immediately directing (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services) to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are
harmed by this disastrous program.”  

Local authorities found the suspect,
Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, dead in a New
Hampshire storage unit late Thursday, five days after the shooting at
Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, that wounded nine and killed two students. 

Two
days after the Brown shooting, an MIT professor was found shot in his
home and later died at the hospital. Authorities also linked that
killing to Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, attended Brown in the early 2000s.

Visa program

The diversity visa program, also known as DV1, grants up to 50,000 immigrant visas each year under a lottery system that aims to select individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S. 

Most
lottery winners reside outside the United States and are processed by
the State Department. Lottery winners who are within the U.S. are
processed by USCIS. 

More than 14 million individuals applied for the program in 2021, the most recent year for which the State Department has data.

Noem
said in her post she was acting on behalf of President Donald Trump,
who tried to end the diversity visa program in his first term after an
individual from Uzbekistan who came through the program carried out an
attack in New York City that killed eight people.

It’s the latest effort by the Trump administration to curtail legal immigration after a tragedy. 

The
administration paused asylum applications after an Afghan national who
was granted asylum was charged with killing one National Guard member
and wounding another in last month’s shooting in Washington, D.C.