New York: The Trump administration 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.
Investigators said late Thursday that Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese man was the gunman who burst into a building at the Ivy League school and opening fire on students, killing two and wounding nine at the weekend.
He also killed a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with whom he had previously studied, two days later, according to police.
Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem wrote on social media on Thursday that Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program 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 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.
Noem pointed to this incident in her post Thursday.
US attorney Leah Foley said at a press briefing on Thursday that Neves Valente studied at Brown University “on an F1 (student) visa around 2000 to 2021” and that “he eventually obtained legal permanent resident status,” but did not go into further detail.
Foley added that Neves Valente had also attended the “same academic program... in Portugal between 1995 and 2000” as the MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, who was shot down in his home in Brookline, in the greater Boston metro area.
There is no immediate indication of a motive in the shootings that rattled the elite New England campuses.
Neves Valente’s body was found at a storage unit in New Hampshire along with two guns. He killed himself, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said Thursday and is believed to have acted alone.
Portugal’s Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel said “it is with great dismay we learned the chief suspect, who was found dead is a Portuguese citizen.”
Portuguese police said there were cooperating with US investigators.
