Trump Suspends Green Card Lottery After Brown University and MIT Shootings

On December 19, 2025, Trump directed the suspension of the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery program after it was revealed that the suspect in fatal shootings at Brown University and MIT had entered the country on a student visa and later obtained a green card through the lottery in 2017. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered USCIS to pause the decades-old program, which grants up to 50,000 green cards annually to applicants from countries underrepresented in U.S. immigration.

The suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the shootings that killed two Brown students, wounded nine others, and killed an MIT professor. The diversity lottery was created by Congress, and legal challenges to its suspension by executive action are considered likely.

The suspension affects thousands of pending applicants worldwide who have complied with existing rules and completed required vetting, none of whom are connected to the crime that prompted the policy change. Critics say responding to an individual violent crime with a blanket suspension of a congressionally created immigration program illustrates a pattern of using isolated incidents to justify broad, sudden disruptions to established legal pathways.