On December 18, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she ordered the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to suspend a lottery diversity visa program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually in the aftermath of a shooting in Brown University, which killed two students, and another shooting that took the life of an MIT professor.
The suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, entered the United States on a student visa in 2000. In 2017, he received the diversity visa in question, enabling him to become a permanent resident. In other words, Valente would have been able to commit crime from 2000 to 2017 anyway, making the visa irrelevant.
The diversity visa program is popular, with 20 million applicants applying for it in 2025 alone. 131,000 were awarded, including spouses. As this was the sole case of crime used to justify the banning of the visa, the amount of crime brought in by it is negligible, however tragic this incident was.
The Trump administration never questioned why it was so easy for Valente to obtain a firearm, whereas he would have had difficulty in other developed democracies. Immigrants conduct less crime on average than America-born citizens.
