Trump to Suspend Green Card Program? Ex-Immigration Official Warns After Tragic Brown University Shooting

One of the former immigration officers told him that it would not be surprising to see the Donald Trump administration terminate the Green Card program altogether, especially following the termination of the lottery considering the events of the person behind the Brown University shooting. It is important to observe that the Green Card lottery does not resemble the Green Card programs as it was specifically developed to the countries, where the rates of immigration to the US are to be lower.

According to Ricky Murray, the former chief of staff of USCIS, the Refugee and International Operations, the government appears to be adopting a trend of discontinuing programs based on individual cases.

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“I think the administration would like to permanently end various green card programs; however, there is a legislative framework set up that would be almost impossible to work around without congressional action,” Murray told Newsweek.

When it was found that a nation of Afghanistan was related to a recent massacre in Washington, D.C., the administration suspended all immigration applications of the country as well as several others.

Who was Neves Valente?

The accused killing of nineteen year old Ella Cook and eighteen year old Mukhammad Aziz Umurzoko and the injuries of nine others were reportedly as a result of the shooting by a Portuguese citizen, Neves Valente, 48, who was a former Brown University student.

Moreover, he also is suspected of killing a nuclear fusion scientist and MIT professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, and shooting him in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15. Police reports reveal that Valente committed suicide and was found in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire; on Thursday night.

The administration, today, has used the Brown University shooting and murdering of the MIT professor as examples to justify suspending the Green Card lottery, since the suspect, who is a man of Portuguese descent, acquired his citizenship via the Green Card lottery.

Valente came to the United States, according to a post on X by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, through the Diversity Visa immigrant program in 2017 and was subsequently granted lawful permanent resident status, also known as a green card.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said.

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One misstep

“This fits the pattern we continually see under this administration, where one bad actor’s actions are cast onto everyone using that avenue for their immigration processing. They use this blanket rationale to bar entire groups of immigrants and don’t look at any individualized merit or factors in determining whether to approve or deny cases,” Murray said, as per Newsweek.

“The U.S. immigration system had always been set up to weigh individual merit, while this administration is attempting to flip the script and box everyone together and look for one misstep to judge them all,” he added.

Green-card lottery grants a maximum of 55,000 immigrant visas annually to people of those countries that traditionally faced low rates of immigration to the United States. Even though applicants get selected through a random lottery process, applicants must meet prequalification criteria in terms of education, work experience, and background checks before getting permanent resident status.

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