US President Donald Trump suspended on Thursday the permanent resident card lottery program with which the suspect in the recent shootings at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entered the United States.

Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, indicated in a publication on the social network permanent residence cards, known as “green cards.”

“This nefarious individual should never have entered our country,” he said of the suspect, the Portuguese Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected of committing the shooting at Brown University in which two students died and nine others were injured, and of murdering an MIT (Massachusetts Institute) professor. He was found dead Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities reported.

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 granted a diversity immigrant visa, and months later he obtained lawful permanent resident status, according to the affidavit. It is not immediately clear where he was in the period between when he was absent from school on leave in 2001 and when he obtained the visa in 2017.

The diversity visa program offers up to 50,000 green cards each year through a lottery to people from countries underrepresented in the United States, many of them in Africa. Congress created the lottery. The measure is almost certain to face legal challenges.

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Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, an organization dedicated to protecting low-income immigrants, said in response to the decision that the government is “blatantly taking advantage of a national tragedy as a pretext to eliminate legal avenues for immigrants from countries where the majority are not white.”

“This is a moment for elected officials and the American public to speak on behalf of the tens of thousands of people from majority black and brown countries, who will now be left in limbo as the legality of this measure undoubtedly makes its way through the courts,” he said in a statement.

Nearly 20 million people registered for the 2025 visa lottery, and more than 131,000 were selected when spouses of beneficiaries are included. After winning, they must undergo a verification process to be admitted to the United States. Portuguese citizens only obtained 38 places.

Lottery winners are invited to apply for a permanent residence card for immigrants. They are interviewed at consulates and are subject to the same requirements and verifications as other applicants for such cards.

Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem's announcement is the latest example of leveraging a tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was determined to be the aggressor in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, the Trump administration imposed strict rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other countries.

While trying to achieve mass deportations, Trump has attempted to limit or eliminate avenues for legal immigration. Whether they are enshrined in law, such as the diversity visa lottery, or in the Constitution, as with the right to citizenship for anyone born on American soil, has not been discouraged. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.