Trump suspends US green card lottery after Brown, MIT attacks

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration halted the US green card lottery programme, which it said was used by the suspect in the Brown University shooting and killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on social media platform X that she is asking the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the lottery, officially known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.

US authorities earlier identified the shooter as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente
, a 48-year-old Portuguese national who was a former student at Brown.

Ms Noem said he was granted a green card through the lottery programme in 2017. His body was found on Dec 18 after an apparent suicide. 

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Ms Noem said in the post, adding the pause will “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme”.

Suspending the lottery programme, which awards up to 50,000 visas annually, is the latest step by President Donald Trump to limit immigration, often in response to violence that his administration blames on lax immigration policies. 

The administration earlier clamped down on immigration from mostly developing nations after an Afghan national was suspected of shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington.

Mr Trump has also moved to add a US$100,000 (S$129,000) application fee
for H-1B visas, often used by the tech sector.

The administration has also pursued aggressive immigration enforcement, and is moving forward with plans to dramatically expand immigration detention capacity, potentially using up to two dozen warehouse “mega centres” across the country. BLOOMBERG