The Trump administration pauses the green card lottery program

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the Trump administration would pause the diversity visa lottery.
In an X post, she said the suspect in the Brown and MIT shootings had entered through the program.
The green card lottery program issues about 55,000 visas a year.

Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, says the Trump administration would pause the diversity visa lottery program in the wake of the Brown University and MIT shootings.

In an X post on Thursday, Noem said that the man wanted in connection to the Brown University shooting had entered the US in 2017 through the program, commonly known as the green card lottery.

The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.

In 2017, President Trump…

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) December 19, 2025

She added that President Donald Trump had long opposed the lottery.

"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," she wrote.

The diversity visa entry program offers 55,000 visas a year to people from countries with low rates of immigration to the US. It's a multi-step process that includes an interview and medical examination.

Valente, a Portuguese national and former Brown University student, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a New Hampshire storage facility, officials said in a press conference on Thursday.

In addition to killing two and wounding several others in the Brown University shooting, officials said they also believed he is connected to the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor earlier this week.