On Thursday, December 18, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered an immediate suspension of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, commonly known as the green card lottery. The decision was prompted by law enforcement’s identification of Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, as the perpetrator behind two high-profile shootings in the Northeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the pause, characterizing the program as a security “loophole” and stating that the suspect should never have been granted entry into the United States.
The Triggering Events: A Week of Campus Violence
The suspension follows a harrowing multi-state manhunt that concluded on Thursday evening when Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. Investigators have linked him to two separate but related attacks:
- Brown University Shooting: On Saturday, December 13, a gunman opened fire in the Barus and Holley engineering building during an economics study session, killing two students and wounding nine others.
- MIT Professor Murder: Two days later, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a renowned physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was fatally shot at his home in Brookline. Authorities believe the suspect Valente and Loureiro were classmates at the University of Lisbon in the late 1990s and that the suspect may have targeted those connected to his failed academic past.
The Trump administration has seized on the fact that Valente obtained his lawful permanent residency through the diversity lottery in 2017. While the suspect initially entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2000, his transition to a green card via the lottery is being used as the primary justification for the current crackdown.
Secretary Noem has directed USCIS to halt all processing related to the program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similarly paused the issuance of diversity visas at consulates worldwide.
Because the diversity visa program was established by an Act of Congress in 1990, legal experts and civil rights groups have already vowed to challenge the executive branch’s authority to unilaterally suspend it.
This move is part of a wider trend in the administration’s “Reset” of immigration policy, which has seen intensified restrictions following violent incidents involving foreign nationals. The suspension follows a similar set of rules imposed in November after an attack on National Guard members.
Simultaneously, the administration is challenging birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, marking a period of significant transformation for U.S. immigration law.
