US President Donald Trump has suspended the lottery for the so-called Green Card, the United States immigrant visa. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Trump had ordered the immigration authorities to put the world-famous program on hold.
According to Noem, the reason for this is that the suspect in the attack at Brown University in Providence entered the country via the green card lottery USA had immigrated. “This despicable individual should never have been allowed into our country,” Noem wrote on short message service X.
Last Saturday, two people were killed and nine others were injured at the renowned university on Rhode Island. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, another elite US university, was also murdered on Monday. The suspect is a 48-year-old Portuguese man who was discovered dead in a camp on Thursday. His motive still remains a mystery.
Up to 50,000 green cards per year
As part of the diversity program, U.S. authorities award up to 50,000 immigrant visas, known as green cards, each year to people from countries that have little representation in the U.S., many of them in Africa. This year, almost 20 million people applied for the visa lottery. If you include spouses of the applicants, more than 131,000 people won. Among them are 38 people from Portugal. The US authorities will check the background of each winner before entry.
Trump has long opposed the green card lottery. This is not the first time that he has used immigrant crimes as an opportunity to achieve political goals. For example, Trump had imposed far-reaching rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other countries because an Afghan shot at members of the National Guard in November.
