Star Metro - US halts green card lottery after MIT professor, Brown University killings

Investigators said late Thursday that Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese man was the gunman who burst into a building at the Ivy League school and opening fire on students, killing two and wounding nine at the weekend.

He also killed a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with whom he had previously studied, two days later, according to police.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem wrote on social media on Thursday that Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program 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 United States," according to the State Department.

Noem described Neves Valente, who police said Thursday was found dead by suicide after a days-long manhunt, was 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 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program," Noem said.

In 2017, during 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 Thursday.

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 guns. He killed himself, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said Thursday and is believed to have acted alone.

Portugal's Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel said "it is with great dismay we learned the chief suspect, who was found dead is a Portuguese citizen."

Portuguese police said there were cooperating with US investigators.

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.

Six of the wounded were still in hospital in stable condition, and three have been released, university president Christina Paxson said in a statement Thursday.

For days, officials voiced their mounting frustration with the 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.

The US has suffered more than 300 incidents in which more than four or more people were shot this year.

Attempts to restrict access to firearms still face political deadlock.

W.Richard--SMC