WASHINGTON: The Trump administration announced on Thursday (Dec 18) it will suspend a green card lottery that allowed a man believed to be behind both a mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor into the United States.
Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, is accused of bursting into a building at the Ivy League school on Saturday and opening fire on students sitting exams, killing two and wounding nine.
He is also accused of killing a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two days later.
Homeland security chief Kristi Noem wrote on social media on Thursday that Neves Valente “entered the US through the diversity lottery immigrant visa programme (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card”.
The US green card lottery grants up to 55,000 permanent resident visas annually to people “from countries with low rates of immigration to the US”, according to the State Department.
Noem described Neves Valente, who police said on Thursday was found dead by suicide after a days-long manhunt, as a “heinous individual” who “should never have been allowed in our country.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to pause the DV1 programme to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” she wrote.
In 2017, during US President Donald Trump’s first term, the Republican leader vowed a battery of tough measures to curb immigration, including terminating the green card lottery, after a deadly terror attack in New York.
Noem pointed to this incident in her post on Thursday, saying: “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.”
US attorney Leah Foley said at a press briefing on Thursday that Neves Valente studied at Brown University “on an F1 (student) visa around 2000 to 2021” and that “he eventually obtained legal permanent resident status”, but did not go into further detail.
Foley added that Neves Valente had also attended the “same academic program … in Portugal between 1995 and 2000” as the MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, who was shot down in his home in Brookline, in the greater Boston metro area.
There is no immediate indication of a motive in the shootings that rattled the elite New England campuses.
Neves Valente’s body was found at a storage unit in New Hampshire along with two firearms. He died by suicide, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said on Thursday and is believed to have acted alone.
The two student victims from Brown were Ella Cook, vice president of the university’s Republican Party association, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, originally from Uzbekistan, who had hoped to become a neurosurgeon.
Six of the wounded were still in hospital in stable condition, and three have been released, university president Christina Paxson said in a statement on Thursday.
Investigators released images of a person of interest and an individual who was seen standing near that person in an effort to trace them.
For days, officials voiced their mounting frustration with the seemingly endless manhunt.
The case finally blew open thanks to a trail of financial data and video surveillance footage gathered at both crime scenes.
“HIDING HIS TRACKS”
“The groundwork that started in the city of Providence … led us to that connection,” Perez said.
In Boston, Foley said Neves Valente had been “sophisticated in hiding his tracks”.
He switched the license plates on his rental vehicle at one point and was using a phone that investigators had difficulty tracking.
Authorities initially detained a different man in connection with the shooting, but later released him.
The university has faced questions, including from Trump, about its security arrangements after it emerged that none of its 1,200 security cameras were linked to the police’s surveillance system.
There have been more than 300 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot.
Attempts to restrict access to firearms still face political deadlock.
“Nothing can fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered by last weekend’s gun violence,” said Paxson, Brown’s president.
“Now, however, our community has the opportunity to move forward and begin a path of repair, recovery and healing.”
