Trump halts green card lottery Brown, MIT shooting suspect used to enter US
Diversity visa programme makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries little represented in the US.
President Donald Trump has suspended the green card lottery programme that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X on Thursday that at Trump’s direction she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the programme.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said.
On December 13, a shooter burst into a building at Brown, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island, where students were taking exams, and opened fire, killing two and wounding nine.
Then on December 15, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was fatally shot in his home in the greater Boston metro area.
After a six-day multi-state manhunt, the suspect of the Brown University shooting was found dead on Thursday. Police believe the same man, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, was also behind the MIT professor shooting.
The diversity visa programme makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the United States, many of them in Africa.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.