Immigration lawyer: Trump ban prompted by Brown shooter won’t hold up in court
Within hours of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente being identified on Thursday night as the man believed to be behind the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT physics professor in Boston , his immigration status became a national issue.
Neves Valente initially entered the United States on a student visa in 2000 to study physics at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, according to officials at a press conference held Thursday night after Neves Valente was found dead in Salem, New Hampshire. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa via the green card lottery system, and months later obtained permanent residence status.
On Saturday, Neves Valente entered a building on the Brown campus and opened fire in a lecture hall, killing two students and injuring nine more, according to a Providence Police Department affidavit. Two days later, he killed an MIT professor at his apartment building in Brookline.
When police tracked Neves Valente to a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night, they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Later that night, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on Twitter that, at the direction of President Donald Trump, she was suspending the green card lottery system that had allowed Neves Valente to remain in the country.
"I am immediately directing [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program," Noem wrote.
Under the current rules, the U.S. allows up to 55,000 immigrants to enter the country each year via the diversity lottery program, according to the government's official website .
On Friday, immigration attorney Charles Kuck, an adjunct professor at Emery University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, who represented immigration groups in 2018 when Trump first tried to enact a ban on Muslims entering the country, said the administration's latest sweeping proclamation has little chance of holding up in court.
"They can't not process the cases," Kuck said. "We know that, they know that, federal courts have said that. They have to process lottery cases."
The problem, Kuck said, is that Trump's approach is to make a broad announcement while providing few details.
"Is the president going to issue a proclamation under 212(f), which would bar entry of anybody under this?" Kuck said. "Then that's a different story, and we probably have to litigate that all the way to the Supreme Court because of Trump v. Hawaii, and the Muslim ban."
The green card lottery was created by congress in 1990 to diversify the pool of immigrants coming to the United States, according to the USCIS website . In the 35 years since it was enacted, more than 1 million people have immigrated to the U.S. under the lottery system.
To be eligible, potential immigrants must have the equivalent of a high-school diploma from their country and then pass a background check, according to Kuck.
Neves Valente had attended the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he is accused of killing on Monday, officials said.
In her social media statement, Noem said, "This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country."
Kuck believes the administration is blaming the program for the actions of one person, who was a qualified applicant at the time.
"This administration will never let a crisis go to waste," Kuck said. "So a guy who came under the lottery eight years ago commits a heinous crime, so let's end the program? That might be a step too far for any judge in America."
Kuck said Trump could try to enforce the suspension of the green card lottery under the same authority granted to him by the Supreme Court in the Trump v. Hawaii decision in 2018.
Kuck doesn't think it will work.
"He clearly does not have the authority or power to not process cases," Kuck said. "The Supreme Court case gave the president, with the Muslim ban, a lot of authority under that. But it's not unlimited. There has to be a valid underlying reason that makes at least some sense of some kind. The fact that one person might commit a crime eight years later, I'm not sure that passes the test."
Kuck said the administration had processed few diversity lottery cases for the current year, and that no winners had been announced yet for 2026.
"It's clear the administration has been trying to find a way to not let anybody enter through this program, and this guy gave them an excuse," Kuck said.
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