Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem on Friday announced on X that, at the order of US President Donald Trump, she has instructed the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program
The US government has paused the green card lottery program after the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings was found to be a beneficiary of the system.
Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem on Friday announced on X that, at the order of US President Donald Trump, she has instructed the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Who was the suspect?
Earlier today, authorities found Velente dead at a storage unit in New Hampshire, along with two firearms. He died by suicide, Providence police chief Oscar Perez said.
Valente was a 48-year-old man from Portugal who had studied at Brown University, officials announced at a press conference today.
Meanwhile, the motive of the double mass shootings is still unclear. Valente, who had been a permanent US resident since 2017, is believed to have acted alone.
He is also accused of killing a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two days later.
“Tonight, our Providence neighbours can finally breathe a little bit easier,” Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters.
How did the police find him?
After days of manhunting with a bounty of $50,000 from the FBI, authorities were finally able to track down the suspect on Friday.
“The groundwork that started in the city of Providence…led us to that connection,” Perez said.
In Boston, federal prosecutor Leah Foley, the US attorney for Massachusetts, explained how Neves Valente had been “sophisticated in hiding his tracks.”
He switched the plates on his rental vehicle at one point and was using a phone that investigators had difficulty tracking, but eventually the pieces started falling into place.
Authorities initially detained a different man in connection with the shooting, but later released him.
With inputs from agencies
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