President Donald Trump's administration announced it will halt the visa lottery program that allowed the suspect in the Brown University shooting to enter the United States.
The lottery grants approximately 50,000 immigrant visas each year, according to the U.S. government.
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But Trump has long opposed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, sometimes known as the DV Program. On Friday, his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, revealed that she had ordered him to end the lottery immediately.
He also identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who received his green card, a certificate of permanent residence, through the lottery in 2017.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed into our country,” Noem wrote in her statement on social media.
“At the direction of President Trump, I am immediately directing USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] pause the DV1 program to ensure that no Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
Campaign to end the visa lottery
Friday's announcement is not the first time Trump has sought to end the diversity visa lottery.
Trump has long sought to narrow the country's path to legal immigration and has used crime as a pretext to do so.
Noem herself noted that, in 2017, Trump “fought” to shut down the diversity visa lottery in the wake of an attack in New York City in which a truck plowed into a crowd of people, killing eight.
In his speech at an FBI graduation ceremony in December 2017, Trump, then in his first term as president, called on Congress to “end the visa lottery system.”
“They have a lottery. You pick the people. Do you think the country is giving us its best people? No,” Trump said.
“What kind of system is that? They come by lottery. They give us their worst people.”
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program was established in 1990 to ensure that applicants from underrepresented countries had access to the United States immigration system.
Immigrant rights advocates have long argued that the paths to permanent residency are narrow for those who do not already have a spouse, relative or some other type of sponsor in the country.
The visa lottery helps respond to that need by creating an alternative route to residency.
The lottery system selects visa recipients at random, but critics argue it remains a long shot to U.S. residency, and even successful applicants must pass a rigorous screening process after the lottery.
While the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program used to accept 55,000 applicants each year, in 2000 that number dropped to its current level, according to the American Immigration Council.
Suspect identified
Friday's decision to immediately suspend the lottery comes as new details emerge about Neves Valente, a physics academic found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire after a nationwide manhunt.
The search began on December 13, when gunfire erupted on the campus of Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island.
The school's fall semester was coming to an end and the exam period had begun. Students in the Barus and Holley physics lab were taking their end-of-course exams when a suspect, dressed in black, entered the building and opened fire, killing two students and wounding nine others.
The physics lab was near the edge of campus and the suspect was able to escape on foot undetected.
The manhunt included several false starts, as authorities said they quickly detained a person of interest, only to release him without charge.
Then, on November 15, law enforcement officials announced that a plasma physics scholar named Nuno Loureiro had been found dead in his home after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.
Loureiro was also a Portuguese immigrant and had worked as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly prestigious scientific institution.
It was not immediately clear whether the two shootings were related, and authorities faced pressure to bring the Brown University shooter to justice as the manhunt dragged on.
But on Thursday night, authorities announced that they had discovered Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and that they believed he was responsible for both attacks.
Neves Valente had previously studied a doctoral program at Brown, although he did not complete his degree, and had been a classmate of Loureiro in Portugal.
Visa revocations
The Trump administration has a history of revoking visas and ending immigration programs after high-profile attacks.
On November 26, for example, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot while on patrol in Washington, D.C., as part of Trump's crime crackdown in the capital.
The suspect in that case was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had previously worked with allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.
One of the National Guard soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, eventually died from her injuries.
Trump responded to the incident by announcing that he would halt all visa and asylum applications by Afghan citizens, despite protests from human rights and veterans groups.
The Republican leader also said he would seek a “permanent pause” in the entry of immigrants from “all third world countries.”
After the shooting, the Trump White House restricted entry to 19 countries it had identified in June as “high risk” and expanded the list of restrictions to include 20 more countries.
Trump has also taken specific steps to strip people of their immigration status after the shootings.
After the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in September, the Trump administration announced it would revoke the visas of six foreigners who posted disrespectful comments or memes online about the attack. They came from countries ranging from Argentina to Brazil and from Germany to Paraguay.
Free speech advocates said the decision was a clear violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects free speech.
But the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to expel foreign nationals whose views do not align with its political priorities.
“Foreigners who take advantage of United States hospitality while celebrating the murder of our citizens will be removed,” the US State Department wrote in response.
The suspect in the Kirk shooting is a 22-year-old U.S. citizen named Tyler James Robinson from Utah.
Studies have repeatedly shown that American-born citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants.
