President Donald Trump has suspended the US green card lottery scheme in the wake of a mass shooting at Brown University last week in which two people were killed.
The suspect, a Portuguese man who was found dead on Thursday, entered the country through the diversity lottery immigrant visa programme (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that she has paused the visa scheme under Trump's direction to 'ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme.'
US officials indicated the suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, was also suspected of murdering Portuguese MIT professor Nuno Loureiro earlier in the week.
The programme makes 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process for entries from countries with low immigration rates to the US. Noem shared on social media that Trump had previously attempted to end the scheme in 2017 after a truck-ramming attack in New York City, in which eight people died.
Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national and Islamic State supporter, also used the DV1 scheme to enter the US before committing his attack.
Valente was found dead in a storage facility, believed to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a six-day manhunt. Evidence collected linked him to both crimes, including CCTV footage and eyewitness accounts.
Brown University President Christina Paxson confirmed Valente was previously enrolled at the university, studying for a PhD in physics, but had no current affiliation. The deaths of two students during the shooting at Brown, identified as Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, have sent shockwaves through the campus.
Officials are still investigating the motive behind the shootings, as authorities continue to grapple with the intersection of immigration policy and gun violence.
