Trump orders end to diversity visa lottery after university shooter entered through program

President Trump ordered Homeland Security to shut down the diversity visa lottery after learning that the gunman who attacked two U.S. universities this month entered the country under that program.

Authorities said Thursday night that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was responsible for the shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Authorities said he killed himself.

He was from Portugal and was a student at Brown earlier this century.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said he came to the U.S. through the lottery. She said Mr. Trump has ordered her to shut the program down.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said.

The visa lottery doles out immigration passes based on chance rather than job skills or family ties. It has long been a target for Mr. Trump, who has pushed for a more purposeful immigration system.

He included ending the lottery as part of his 2018 proposal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrant “Dreamers,” in exchange for border wall money and new limits on the chain of family migration.

He also suspended admissions from the lottery as a pandemic measure in 2020. President Biden revoked that order in 2021.

The lottery doles out 50,000 passes a year to immigrants. It gives them a green card signifying permanent legal status, which is the key step on the path to citizenship.

The goal was to broaden the demographics of immigrants to the U.S. beyond traditional sending nations in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

The law appears to require that the lottery still take place, but the president claims the power to refuse to admit the winners.

Of the 50,000 annual approvals, most are outside the U.S., but several thousand are usually already here, in some less permanent status. The suspension would seem to block them from gaining a green card, but would not automatically revoke their current less-permanent status.

The program is heavily sought after.

In 2020, nearly 15 million applications covering more than 23 million people were filed.

Nearly 1.7 million of those applications came from Uzbekistan — about 5% of the country’s total population. Another 950,000 applications came from Sierra Leone, or more than 10% of its total population.

Supporters say the program is part of America’s soft power, giving people in far-flung places of the globe hope of attaining a place here.

“The perpetrator in these horrific attacks should face justice under the law — but it’s unjust to block the legal immigration processes of tens of thousands of people who have absolutely nothing to do with this offense,” said Myal Greene, president of World Relief.

He said Mr. Trump’s real goal is to cut levels of legal immigration, and he is using “an isolated evil action” to accomplish it.

Critics say the program is subject to fraud and offers little concrete value to the U.S. They have proposed either cutting those visas or reallocating them to immigrants coming for family reunification or employment.

During the first Trump administration, the government announced new rules to try to cut down on fraud by requiring information from an unexpired passport on each entry.

Officials had discovered fraud rings were filing bogus applications, often on behalf of people who didn’t know they were being entered, then selling the cases to others. In other instances, winners would engage in marriage fraud to bring someone in with them.