NEW YORK: The Trump administration announced on Thursday it will suspend a green card lottery that allowed a man believed to be behind both a mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor into the United States.
Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, is accused of bursting into a building at the Ivy League school on Saturday and opening fire on students, killing two and wounding nine.
He is also accused of killing a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two days later.
Homeland security chief Kristi Noem wrote on social media on Thursday that Neves Valente “entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card.”
The US green card lottery grants up to 55,000 permanent resident visas annually to people “from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States,” according to the State Department.
Noem described Neves Valente, who police said Thursday was found dead by suicide after a days-long manhunt, was a “heinous individual” who “should never have been allowed in our country.”
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” Noem said.
In 2017, during US President Donald Trump’s first term, the Republican leader vowed a battery of tough measures to curb immigration, including terminating the green card lottery, after a deadly terror attack in New York.
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