Brown University President Christina Paxson speaks to reporters gathered at the Providence Public Safety Complex on Dec. 16, 2025. Gov. Dan McKee, far left, and Providence Mayor Brett Smiley are also pictured. (Photo by Christopher Shea/Rhode Island Current)
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said late Thursday she was suspending applications for a diversity visa program because the man suspected of killing two Brown University students and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor this week obtained a green card through the program in 2017.
Noem said on social media she was “immediately directing (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
Local authorities found the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, dead in a New Hampshire storage unit late Thursday, five days after the shooting at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, that wounded nine and killed two students.
Two days after the Brown shooting, an MIT professor was found shot in his home and later died at the hospital. Authorities also linked that killing to Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, attended Brown in the early 2000s.
Visa program
The diversity visa program, also known as DV1, grants up to 50,000 immigrant visas each year under a lottery system that aims to select individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.
Most lottery winners reside outside the United States and are processed by the State Department. Lottery winners who are within the U.S. are processed by USCIS.
More than 14 million individuals applied for the program in 2021, the most recent year for which the State Department has data.
Noem said in her post she was acting on behalf of President Donald Trump, who tried to end the diversity visa program in his first term after an individual from Uzbekistan who came through the program carried out an attack in New York City that killed eight people.
It’s the latest effort by the Trump administration to curtail legal immigration after a tragedy.
The administration paused asylum applications after an Afghan national who was granted asylum was charged with killing one National Guard member and wounding another in last month’s shooting in Washington, D.C.
