Trump pauses green-card lottery after Brown University shooting

Syra Ortiz Blanes and Garrett Shanley, Miami Herald on Dec 19, 2025

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Friday that the Trump administration is pausing an immigrant green-card lottery program that granted the Brown University shooting suspect legal permission to enter the United States years ago.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” said Noem in a tweet. “At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

On Thursday night, Providence, Rhode Island, police identified Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente as a person of interest in a Dec. 13 shooting that left two dead and several injured on the Ivy League campus. Authorities found Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old green card holder, dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire, ending a week-long manhunt. His last known address was in Miami. He had entered the United States through the diversity lottery program in 2017, during the last Trump administration.

Congress created the green-card diversity program, known as DV1, in 1990 to attract people from countries that have low rates of immigration to the United States. In fiscal year 2026, 55,000 immigrants will be allowed to enter into a lottery to come to the United States and receive green cards as long as they are not from countries that had more than 50,000 nationals come to the United States in the last five years.

That means that people from several countries that are a large source of migration to South Florida — including Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Brazil, and Colombia — are ineligible to apply. But the pause still represents another way the Trump administration is limiting the already extremely narrow pathway to legally immigrate to the United States.

President Donald Trump had previously called on the diversity lottery program to end in 2017 after Uzbekistani national Sayfullo Saipov used a truck to carry out an attack on behalf of ISIS, the terrorist group, in Manhattan. During Trump’s first term, the White House also published a statement h ighlighting diversity lottery winners convicted of perpetrating or conspiring to perpetrate terrorist acts, including Saipov. He entered the United States t hrough the diversity program in 2010 and was s entenced to eight consecutive life terms in federal prison in 2023.

“President Trump was right again,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote on Friday, referring to his 2017 comments about Saipov’s case.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday endorsed the move on social media, writing, “abolish the diversity visa today!” The Republican governor was amplifying a post from one of his former aides, Christina Pushaw, who wrote that she has “never heard a good argument” for the program.

A Stanford University study spanning 140 years of data showed immigrants are less likely to be imprisoned for crimes than their U.S.-born counterparts. But in recent months, the Trump administration has used high-profile violent crimes to shut down other immigration programs.

After Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, was charged with shooting two National Guard members in Washington D.C. in November, the Trump administration issued a new wave of immigration restrictions. That includes freezing all pending asylum claims as well as immigration applications and naturalization ceremonies for immigrants from 19 so-called high-risk countries. Among those countries are Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti, whose nationals immigrating to the United States largely gravitate to South Florida.

Lakanwal has since been charged in the murder of one of the National Guardsmen, Sarah Beckstrom, who died from her injuries.