President Trump ordered on Thursday night the pause of the Diversity Visa (DV1) lottery program that had let the man who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor enter the United States.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” stated Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a late‑night post on X. “At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
The suspect was 48‑year‑old Claudio Neves Valente, a native of Portugal who received a DV1 visa in 2017 and later obtained a green card. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self‑inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
Neves Valente was the prime suspect in the December 13 mass shooting that killed Brown students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and wounded nine people, as well as the December 15 murder of MIT nuclear science professor Nuno Loureiro.
Neves Valente had enrolled in a graduate physics program at Brown during the 2000‑01 academic year, taking a leave of absence in April and formally withdrawing in 2003. His whereabouts and activities between 2017 and the shooting are unknown; his last documented address was in Miami, Florida.
The DV1 program, created under the Immigration Act of 1990, allocates up to 50,000 visas each year, selecting applicants from countries that have historically sent relatively few immigrants to the U.S. over the past five years. For 2025, nearly 20 million people entered the lottery, with more than 131,000 winners and their spouses chosen. Portuguese nationals secured 38 spots.
Trump had previously urged the termination of the program after the 2017 attack in Lower Manhattan, when Uzbekistan national Sayfullo Saipov drove a pickup truck into a busy bike path on the Hudson River, killing eight people and injuring 11. Saipov was convicted in January 2023 of murder and related charges, receiving eight life sentences plus 260 years in prison.
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