So, now it appears that every time an immigrant who is a member of a group that Trump doesn't like commits a crime, members of that group will be declared persona non grata and will not be allowed in the country. Genius, pure genius. He generalizes just like a child.
Trump Suspends Green Card Lottery After Brown, MIT Attacks
Ramsey Al-Rikabi and Alicia A. Caldwell
Fri, December 19, 2025 at 12:15 PM EST 3 min read
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration is halting the US green card lottery program, which it said was used by the suspect in the Brown University shooting and killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X that she’s asking US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the lottery, officially known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
Authorities earlier identified the shooter as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national who was a former student at Brown. Noem said he was granted a green card through the lottery program in 2017.
His body was found Thursday after an apparent suicide, days after two students were killed in the rampage that also injured nine others on Brown’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island. Authorities also connected Valente to the death of MIT’s Nuno Loureiro in a Boston suburb about 50 miles away. Valente studied physics at Brown in the early 2000s and also attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said in the post, adding the pause will “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program - created as an act of Congress in 1990 - makes up to 55,000 immigrant visas available each year through a random lottery for people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the US. The majority of visas annually go to foreigners from Africa, according to State Department data.
For the 2026 lottery, about 129,500 people — including applicants and their spouses and children — were chosen, according to the State Department. They were selected at random from more than 20.8 million qualified entries submitted during an application period that ran from October to November 2024.
In 2023, the most recent data year available, a total of nearly 1.2 million people were awarded green cards in the US, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump has long sought to limit the lottery program, beginning in his first term. Although his initial travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries didn’t directly address the lottery, it effectively blocked many lottery candidates from those nations from being eligible for the program.
The administration faced multiple legal challenges, including lawsuits from affected diversity visa recipients. In one case, a federal judge in 2020 ordered the government to resume issuing visas to lottery winners covered by the ban.
In a separate case, a federal court in 2022 struck down a Trump-era rule requiring applicants have a valid passport just to enter the lottery.
The administration’s latest move though forms part of a much broader crackdown on immigration, often in response to violence his administration blames on lax policies.
The administration earlier clamped down on immigration from mostly developing nations after an Afghan national was suspected of shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington.
It also moved to add a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas, often used by the tech sector, and has raised the prospect of vetting years of social media histories for tourists wanting to visit the US.
Trump pledged during his campaign to carry out the largest deportation in US history. Border patrol agents have been active in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles. The administration is also moving forward with plans to dramatically expand immigration detention capacity, potentially using up to two dozen warehouse “mega centers” across the country.
finance.yahoo.com |
