At President Donald Trump's direction, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has suspended the Diversity Immigrant Visa (DV) Program, which she says was used eight years ago by the man, now deceased, accused of murdering two Brown University students and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country," said Sec. Noem.
The DV program was created by Congress with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, which President George H. W. Bush signed into law on Nov. 29, 1990.
Each year, up to 55,000 immigrant visas are made available to individuals from countries that have sent relatively few immigrants to the U.S. Applicants are selected at random through a lottery system, but winners must meet education or work requirements and pass background, medical, and security checks.
It is meant to encourage immigration from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, balancing immigration flows and promoting cultural diversity – not to meet labor shortages or humanitarian crises.
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), agrees with Noem: the DV program is a "disastrous" one that has harmed Americans.
"The idea that we would be picking new citizens of the United States almost literally out of a hat is kind of the dumbest way to run an immigration policy," he tells AFN. "Rather than go and fix the system, which does not really allow us to take the people who are most likely to contribute in this country, they went and created this gimmick, and it has not worked."
Especially now, with these shooting deaths, Mehlman says "we are seeing … the consequences of it."
Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, the suspect in the shootings at Brown and MIT, was a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown University physics graduate student. Officials have said that he was issued a DV immigrant visa and later became a lawful permanent resident in 2017 through that program.
The Trump administration has not said how long the suspension might last or if it plans to propose permanent changes.
