Trump administration suspends U.S. green card lottery over university sho0tings

US President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program, which allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT sho0tings to come to the United States. Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, is accused of bursting into a building at the Ivy League school on Dec 13 and opening fire on students sitting exams, k!lling two and wounding nine. He is also accused of k!lling a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two days later. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trumps direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country, she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente. Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are underrepresented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges. Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected, including spouses of the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants. The post Trump administration suspends U.S. green card lottery over university sho0tings appeared first on Linda Ikeji Blog.