President Donald Trump is suspending the Green Card lottery program as part of his administration’s effort to reduce immigration and curb rising crime, aiming to make the United States safer for its citizens.
Trump’s decision follows a shooting at Brown University that left two students and an MIT professor dead, while nine others were injured.
The suspected shooter, Neves Valente, a 48-year-old immigrant, reportedly entered the country through the lottery program in 2017 and was issued a Green Card.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she was ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she wrote on X.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.
The diversity visa program that Neves Valente was on has up to 50,000 green cards available each year. People from countries underrepresented in the United States obtain visas through a lottery.
Many of the countries are in Africa, and in 2025, nearly 20 million people applied for the visa; more than 131,000 were selected, including spouses, as winners. Trump has long opposed the visa and other forms of immigration to the country.
In November, an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members, prompting the Trump administration to impose rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other countries.
Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
