Washington, 19 Dec 

President Donald Trump on Thursday suspended the green card lottery programme that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to enter the United States, a move likely to invite legal challenges.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she had ordered the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the diversity visa programme.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected of the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and in the killing of an MIT professor. Authorities said he was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

According to an affidavit from a Providence police detective, Neves Valente began studying at Brown University in 2000 on a student visa. He later took a leave of absence in 2001. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and subsequently obtained legal permanent residence status. Officials said it remains unclear where he lived in the years between leaving Brown and receiving the visa.

The diversity visa programme, created by Congress, makes up to 50,000 green cards available annually through a lottery system for applicants from countries with low immigration rates to the US. Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 lottery, with over 131,000 selected, including family members. Portuguese nationals secured just 38 slots.

Trump has long opposed the programme and has repeatedly sought to restrict both legal and illegal immigration. The suspension follows previous policy shifts made after violent incidents involving immigrants and comes amid the administration’s broader push to curb immigration pathways, even those established by law.