The United States President Donald Trump has announced the immediate suspension of the green card lottery programme following a shooting incident at Brown University.
In a post on the social platform X on Thursday, December 18, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Trump had ordered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the programme.
The suspension follows the shootings at Brown University that killed two students, and a professor, and wounded nine others.
The suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente is said to have entered America ona student visa in 2000. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are underrepresented in the U.S., many of which are in Africa.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery on the grounds that it contravened the U.S immigration policy.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this programme, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 programme and murdered eight people,” Kristi Noem stated.
The program was suspended in 2020 during Trump’s first term as part of broader COVID-19-related restrictions on legal immigration, but the move was reversed in 2021 under former President Joe Biden.
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