Trump suspended the green card lottery after the Brown shooting. What does that mean? – The Boston Globe

The move is likely to be challenged in court.

It also marks the apparent end, at least for now, of a green card program that emerged as a political target almost a decade ago, and another notch on the long list of immigration crackdown measures the federal government has enacted since January.

The first Trump administration attempted to shut down the lottery in 2017, after an Uzbekistani immigrant with a diversity visa killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path. But Congress chose not abolish the program, preserving a small and relatively smooth path to American residency.

Neves Valente, the Brown suspect, first came to the US on a student visa in August 2000, obtained a diversity immigrant visa in 2017, and later became a legal permanent resident, according to an affidavit released last week. His immigration status after he took a leave of absence from Brown University in 2001 until 2017 remains unclear.

Leslie Ditrani, a Boston-based immigration attorney and executive director of the nonprofit Pathway for Immigrant Workers, expressed dismay over news of the pause, and called it “misguided” to use the Brown and MIT tragedies as a reason to do so.

“The fact that someone many years ago came into the United States through a program … doesn’t mean that is related to this horrendous crime,” Ditrani said.

“In the United States, we value that we are a country of immigrants, that immigrants bring a richness to our country that we would not have without them,” she continued. The green card lottery “actively [seeks] to create diversity in a country that values diversity. So to do away with that, we’re just chipping away at immigration in general.”

Unlike most US visa programs, the green card lottery is random.

Applicants do not need to be sponsored by a resident or have family in the US. The only significant requirement is that applicants have a high school diploma or two years of mid-level work experience. They must also hail from a country with fewer than 50,000 nationals admitted to the US in the past five years — often places like Nepal, Nigeria, and Iran.

Applicants are offered the chance to become permanent residents by simply filling out an online form, after which names are drawn from millions of entries. If chosen, participants are invited to apply for a green card, subject to the same requirements and security screenings as all other residency applicants.

In 2025, almost 20 million people applied for the lottery and 131,000 were selected, including spouses and children of the winners. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots, according to figures from the US State Department.

The diversity program brings in only a fraction of immigrants that enter the US, making up between 4 and 5 percent of all individuals granted Lawful Permanent Resident status, or a green card. And the lottery recipients are dwarfed by approvals for tourism or student visas, which amounted to roughly 6 million and 400,000, respectively, in the last fiscal year.

Those who win the lottery are often highly educated and more likely to have college degrees than US natives, according to a 2018 analysis from the Migrantion Policy Institute.

Ricky Murray, former chief of staff of the USCIS Refugee and International Operations Program, argued that the Trump administration did not have legal authority to terminate the program permanently, since it was established by the Immigration Act of 1990.

“Congress would have to take action to actually end the diversity lottery program, this is not something [Trump] can unilaterally do,” Murray said. Even pausing the program was “legally questionable,” he said.

Noem did not indicate for how long the administration intended to suspend the program, creating uncertainty for people who were selected in the lottery last spring.

Those people are likely in the process of completing the application and screening process, which must be submitted and approved by September 30 next year, Ditrani said.

“These visas come with a huge expiration date on them,” Ditrani said. “If October 1 comes, and you don’t have your visa, you are just out of luck.”

Gerardo Blanco, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, said the lottery has staved off criticism from both sides of the political aisle in the past.

“It’s the perfect program to want to eliminate because there are objections ideologically from the left and the right,” he said.

In 2013, some Democrats supported legislation that would have repealed the lottery as part of a broader overhaul of the immigration system, vying to expand opportunities for refugees ad humanitarian migration. But party leaders later repeatedly voiced support for the initiative.

Many conservatives, on the other hand, have been looking to slow immigration on all fronts in the second Trump term.

But the elimination of the lottery after the Brown shooting “seems like, in my view, an opportunistic connection,” Blanco said. “This fits with a broader pattern of the Trump administration of using immigrants as scapegoats, blaming them for pretty much everything that goes wrong in this country.”

The cascading immigration enforcement actions this year have spread fear through foreign-born communities across the country.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration beefed up a list of countries under a travel ban to 39 in total, after an Afghani immigrant shot two National Guard troops in Washington DC. And Trump has also slashed the number of refugees the US will admit, limiting it to mostly South Africans, and revoked thousands of visas, including some held by students who engaged in pro-Palestinian protests.

The White House in June tried to revoke temporary legal protections that granted more than one million Haitians and Venezuelans the right to live and work in the US – which a federal judge blocked in September. At the same time, Trump has launched a “gold card” visa program, offering legal status and a possible path to citizenship for people who pay the federal government $1 million.

Now the New England Portuguese community — a sprawling population of nearly 500,000 people centered densely in Southern Massachusetts — is mourning, said Helena DaSilva Hughes, president Immigrants’ Assistance Center in New Bedford.

Not only was Neves Valente, the alleged shooter, a Portuguese immigrant, but the MIT scientist Nuno F.G. Loureiro he purportedly shot also hailed from the country. (Officials believe the pair went to school together in Lisbon.)

Ultimately, because the green card lottery program is so small, “I don’t think it’s going to make a huge impact on our immigrant community with the visa lottery being taken away,” DaSilva Hughes said. Over 41 years at the center, which serves 14,000 clients locally, she has “never heard about anyone that was Portuguese that had gotten their green card through a visa lottery.”

But the worry is palpable.

“It seems like every time something happens within refugee and immigrant communities, policies are put into place that same day,” DaSilva Hughes said. “You wonder, what is going to happen?”

Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_. Niki Griswold can be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her @nikigriswold.