(NewsNation) — The Trump administration is suspending a green card lottery program that authorities said was used by the man accused of killing two students at Brown University and an MIT professor.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on social media late Thursday that, at the president’s direction, she ordered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, or DV1, “to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
On Dec. 13, two students were killed and nine others injured when a gunman opened fire at the physics building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Police later identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Valente was born in Torres Novas, Portugal, and became a legal, permanent U.S. resident in 2017 after arriving as a student in 2000. He later returned under a diversity immigrant visa.
Brown University President Christina Paxson confirmed Valente had enrolled in a doctoral program in physics before withdrawing in 2003. She said he likely attended most of his classes in the Barus & Holley building, where he is accused of opening fire.
Valente is also suspected of killing MIT professor Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro, 47, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the shooting at Brown. Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, had previously studied in Portugal with Valente.
Valente was found dead Thursday inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, ending a six-day, interstate manhunt.
Noem said Valente entered the U.S. through the DV1 program in 2017 and was granted a green card.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she wrote on the social platform X. “In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.”
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program issues up to 50,000 immigrant visas every year, according to the USCIS website. Under the lottery-based program, visas are allocated to individuals at random from countries with low immigration rates to the United States.
NewsNation’s Damita Menezes and Safia Samee Ali contributed to this report.