By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to clamp down on a visa program that aims to increase diversity after the suspect in an attack at Brown University was linked to it, the latest in a flurry of legal immigration restrictions in the past month.
Hours after news broke that the suspect was found dead in New Hampshire on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X that he was a Portuguese national who obtained permanent residence via the diversity visa lottery program. Noem said her department would pause processing of diversity lottery applications “to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
The immediate effects of the move remained unclear on Friday since most of the people using the program apply from abroad through the State Department. A department spokesperson said the diversity program posed a threat to the U.S. public and that they were working “to put in place all necessary measures” to address it, but did not provide further details.
Trump, a Republican, returned to the White House in January vowing to clamp down on legal and illegal immigration. After an Afghan national was accused of attacking National Guard members in late November, his administration swiftly implemented new immigration restrictions, halting processing of Afghan immigration applications, ordering a review of approved asylum cases, and expanding Trump’s existing travel ban to 20% of the world’s countries.
While Trump officials framed the restrictions as needed for national security, critics said they used the attack to achieve a broader goal of reducing legal immigration.
Jorge Loweree, a managing director with the pro-immigration American Immigration Council, said the same dynamic was occurring with the diversity visa program.
“This isn’t about any one individual,” Loweree said. “What we’re seeing is this administration using these cases, these stories, as a pretext to their own end, which is to target people from countries that they deem to be undesirable.”
TRUMP’S OPPOSITION TO THE DIVERSITY VISA PROGRAM
Trump has long criticized the diversity visa program, which offers up to 55,000 immigrant visas each year to countries with lower rates of immigration to the U.S. The program, created by the U.S. Congress in 1990, uses a lottery system to determine which applicants are awarded visas. Those approved can obtain permanent residence and eventual citizenship.
During Trump’s first term in 2017, he called for ending the program after an Uzbek national was accused of a vehicle-ramming attack in New York City that killed eight people and injured many others. The attacker in that case, Sayfullo Saipov, was sentenced in 2023 to eight consecutive life sentences.
Noem said on X that the suspect in the Brown University shooting, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, had entered the U.S. in 2017 through the diversity visa program and “should never have been allowed in our country.” Noem did not provide any evidence of prior security concerns related to the suspect’s admission to the U.S., which occurred during Trump’s first term.
Neves Valente was found dead Thursday night in a storage rental facility in Salem, New Hampshire, officials said. He is also suspected in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days after the Brown attack.
Neves Valente attended Brown University more than two decades ago and was a former classmate in Portugal of the slain MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro.
DIVERSITY REGISTRATION DELAYS PRE-DATE ATTACK
The top countries of origin for diversity visa recipients in fiscal year 2024 were Nepal, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Egypt and Russia, according to State Department figures. Some 41% were from African countries, the figures showed.
Only 118 Portuguese nationals entered the U.S. through the program in the past decade.
Even before Thursday’s revelation about the Brown University shooting suspect’s immigration history, the diversity program registration for fiscal year 2027, which typically begins in October, had already been delayed.
The U.S. State Department said in November that due to program changes, the registration would be postponed to an unknown date.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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