type: timeline_event
On December 19, 2025, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced the immediate suspension of the diversity visa lottery program, linking the decision directly to a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and a separate killing of an MIT professor. The alleged shooter — Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national — had been found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a New Hampshire storage unit on the same day as the suspension announcement. Noem stated that Neves Valente had obtained his green card through the diversity visa lottery in 2017 and declared, "This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country." Secretary of State Marco Rubio simultaneously announced the State Department would pause diversity visa issuance pending a comprehensive security review. At President Trump's direction, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was ordered to immediately halt the DV1 program.
The diversity visa lottery, established by the Immigration Act of 1990, allocates 50,000 visas annually through random selection to nationals of countries with historically low immigration rates to the United States, prioritizing geographic diversity. Recipients undergo the same vetting procedures as other immigrant visa applicants, including background checks, consular interviews, and documentation of qualifying education or work experience. Immigration policy experts questioned whether the suspension would meaningfully enhance national security, noting that Neves Valente had first entered the United States in 2000 on a student visa to pursue graduate studies at Brown, withdrew in 2003, and only later obtained the diversity visa in 2017 — suggesting the relevant screening occurred at multiple points under different visa categories, not solely through the lottery mechanism.
Congressional Democrats immediately criticized the suspension as exploiting a tragedy to dismantle a legal immigration pathway used disproportionately by African and Caribbean nations with limited access to family-based or employment-based immigration categories. The announcement came during a week when DHS released its year-end enforcement review highlighting that 2.5 million undocumented immigrants had left the United States in 2025 — comprising 622,000 formal deportations and 1.9 million self-deportations — the most aggressive enforcement period in modern American history. The diversity lottery suspension extended the administration's immigration restrictions beyond enforcement into legal immigration structures, and Noem's public statements suggested the "pause" could become permanent. Previous attempts during Trump's first term to eliminate the program through legislation had failed to secure sufficient Congressional support, making executive suspension a means of circumventing the deliberative process required for statutory change.