President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. green card lottery system following a mass shooting at Brown University last week, in which two people were killed.
The suspect, a Portuguese man found dead Thursday, entered the country through the Diversity Lottery (DV1) immigrant visa program in 2017 and obtained a green card.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she suspended the visa system under Trump’s leadership to “ensure that no American is further harmed by this disastrous program.”
U.S. officials said they believed the suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, also killed Nuno Loureiro, a Portuguese professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earlier this week.
The program makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process among entries from countries with low immigration rates to the United States.
Writing on social media, Noem said Trump already “fought to end” the plan in 2017 after eight people were killed in a truck-ramming attack in New York.
Uzbek national Sayfullo Saipov, an Islamic State supporter who is serving multiple life sentences for the attack, entered the United States through the DV1 program, according to Noem.
His comments come just hours after Neves Valente was found dead in a warehouse in Salem, New Hampshire, from what police believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police said video evidence and tips from the public led investigators to a rental car place where they found the suspect’s name and matched it to the person they were interested in, after a six-day, multistate manhunt.
He was found dead with a schoolbag and two guns. Evidence in a nearby car matches the scene of the shooting at Brown University in Providence, according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at the Ivy League school from the fall of 2000 to the following spring and was studying for a doctorate in physics.
He had “currently no active affiliation” with Brown, she said.
Officials said they believe Neves Valente fatally shot MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, at his home in Brookline, about 50 miles from Providence, on Monday.
The two men had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s, police said.
Officials said the cases were linked when the suspect’s vehicle was identified through video surveillance footage and a witness at Brown University.
The same car was spotted near the scene of the professor’s shooting, which occurred two days later.
Authorities have not provided any suspected motive for either attack.
Two students were killed and nine others injured when a gunman burst into Brown University’s engineering building on Dec. 13 and opened fire during final exams.
They were identified as Ella Cook, 19, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek American who had just started college.
