The Trump administration is suspending the immigrant visa program under which the man suspected of killing two Brown University students and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor moved to the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday night.

Claudio Neves Valente was issued a diversity visa in 2017 and became a legal permanent resident of the United States that year, according to immigration records in an affidavit filed by police in Providence, Rhode Island.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said on social media.

The Trump administration has pointed to recent violent events as evidence that its crackdown on immigration is necessary to protect Americans.

Last month, President Donald Trump paused all asylum applications and stopped issuing visas to people from Afghanistan after an Afghan national who was a refugee shot two National Guard members, one fatally, in Washington.

Trump has scrutinized diversity immigrant visas before. In his first term, he expressed his disapproval that Sayfullo Saipov, who carried out an attack that killed eight people on a New York City bike path, came to the United States from Uzbekistan on a diversity visa. Saipov was sentenced to life in prison in 2023.

Under the diversity immigrant program, up to 55,000 visas can be awarded annually through a lottery to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. It is a small part of the country’s overall immigration.

In the past, it has offered one of the fastest routes to permanent legal residence, or green cards, and recipients of the visa do not need to have family ties or special skills. Millions of people enter the lottery every year.

The Immigration Act of 1965 ended country-based quotas, which had favored Europeans. When it went into effect, the number of immigrants from Asia and Latin America rose, and those from Italy, Ireland and other European countries dropped significantly.

That prompted a legislative push in the 1980s by Irish American members of Congress, who passed a temporary measure in 1986 to offer an alternative path to a green card for citizens of countries “adversely affected” by the changes in 1965.

A bill that passed a few years later, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., turned that program into a permanent one.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Qasim Naurman/Kenny Holston
c. 2025 The New York Times Company