Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced a pause in the diversity lottery immigrant visa program, which was used by Claudio Neves Valente—the Brown University shooting suspect—to enter the United States. Data shows immigrants are not more likely to commit mass shootings than natural-born U.S. citizens.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comment via email.
Why It Matters
Valente was found dead on Thursday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, according to police. He is suspected in the fatal shootings of two students—Ella Cook, 19, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov—on Brown’s campus and MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Valente was a former Brown student and Portuguese national.
His identification renewed questions about the U.S. immigration system as Noem tied the administration’s pause on the diversity lottery visa to the shooting. The White House has argued that more restrictive immigration measures are needed to prevent violence. Supporters praised the move as improving the country’s national security and safety. But criminologists told Newsweek there is no clear connection between immigration status and likelihood of carrying out a mass shooting, and that the rule change would have a limited impact.
What Is the Diversity Lottery Program?
Noem announced the change in a post to X Thursday night, soon after the suspected gunman was identified.
“The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she wrote.
She continued, “In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people. At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
The diversity visa lottery allows up to 55,000 visas to be given to people from countries that have lower immigration rates. Valente was a Portuguese national who entered the U.S. on the visa in 2017. He earlier entered the U.S. on an F1 student visa around 2000 or 2001 when he studied physics at Brown. He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and withdrew two years later.
Trump sought to end the program during his first term in office.
What Data Shows About Immigrants and Mass Shootings
Immigrants are not statistically more likely to carry out mass shootings than natural-born citizens.
A Cato Institute study published in April showed that from 1966 to 2024, 85.6 percent of mass shooters in the United States were natural-born citizens, while 14.4 percent were foreign born; that’s roughly in line with the foreign-born population, which is around 14.3 percent of people living in the United States, according to the American Immigration Council.
The Violence Prevention Project identified 28 mass shootings in which four or more people were killed since 2020. Public reports confirm immigrants were charged, convicted or believed to have been responsible in three of those shootings.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa was convicted of a March 2021 shooting at a Boulder, Colorado, shooting that killed 10 people; he was a Syrian immigrant.
Huu Can Tran was a suspect in a Monterey Park, California, shooting in January 2023; he was an immigrant from China and died at the scene. Chunli Zhao has been charged, but not convicted, in a shooting in Half Moon Bay, California, also in January 2023.
Criminologists told Newsweek that immigrants are not any more likely to commit mass shootings than natural-born citizens.
Lori Ann Post, director of Chicago’s Institute for Public Health and Medicine at Northwestern University who studies mass shootings, told Newsweek that immigration policy changes are unlikely to “meaningfully reduce mass shootings in the United States.”
Her research also shows that the percentage of mass shootings carried out by immigrants “closely mirrors the proportion of immigrants in the US population overall,” she said.
“There is also no evidence that immigrants are more likely to commit mass shootings than people born in the United States. In fact, immigrants as a group have lower rates of violent crime than US born citizens. Claims that immigration drives mass shootings are not supported by data,” Post added.
James Alan Fox, criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston and author of several books on mass killings, told Newsweek that while the change could prevent a few mass shootings over time, it would be difficult to measure its impact due to the normal variation in numbers from year-to-year.
There have been some cases of people on student visas carrying out mass shootings, but they are coming here for school—not with intention to carry out a shooting, he said. The factors that contribute to these shootings typically occur after they are already in the U.S., Fox added.
Jonathan Metzl, professor of sociology and medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told Newsweek there are “understandable reactions that happen in the aftermath of targeted shootings or mass shootings where people try to tell a story that generalizes the shooter or the particulars of one shooting into a broader category of people.”
“That is potentially human nature,” he said. “We don’t want to see these acts as random, and so we generalize them.”
The problem is that mass shootings are “random acts of violence” and not representative of “something whole,” he said. In the case of immigrants, there is “no statistical correlation” between immigrants and mass shootings. Limiting immigration is unlikely to have much of a reduction on mass shootings, Metzl added.
Conservatives Celebrate Noem Announcement
Noem’s announcement did receive support from many conservatives. “The Diversity Lottery is a mockery of our sovereignty. It admits migrants from all over the world based on chance and not merit, making us poorer and less safe. I commend Secretary Noem for ending this farce,” Senator Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, posted to X.
Andrew Kolvet, Turning Point USA spokesperson, celebrated the announcement on X. “Of all the dumb immigration policies we have as a country, and they are legion, perhaps the dumbest of all is the so-called ‘diversity visa.’ Pause it indefinitely and throw it to the bottom of the sea forever and ever amen.”
What People Are Saying
Katherine Schweit, former FBI official, to Newsweek: “Per capita, US citizens and naturalized citizens commit more violent crimes than non-citizens. No data supports the claim that immigrants commit more or a disproportionate amount of violent crime, including targeted violence and mass murders. What we are seeing is likely reactive policies designed to make people feel safer.”
Representative Chip Roy, Texas Republican, on X: “Good. My PAUSE Act would pause all immigration until we fix the myriad ways in which the system is broken, including so-called diversity visas.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, also on X: “This is pretext. The administration has been planning on halting the Diversity Visa program for months; it was a big priority of Stephen Miller in Trump’s first term, since he hates the idea. So now they’re seizing on this Portuguese guy as an excuse to move up their timeline.”
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on X: “Abolish the diversity visa lottery!”
The Cato Institute report: “The chance of being murdered in a mass shooting committed by a foreign-born shooter was about 1 in 68.4 million per year, compared to a 1 in 10.5 million chance of being murdered in a mass shooting committed by a native-born American shooter. Foreign-born people are not disproportionately responsible for deaths or injuries caused by mass shootings. Moreover, as heinous as these crimes are, they are relatively rare.”
What Happens Next
Noem announced the pause on Thursday. A State Department spokesperson told CNN that the department is “working closely with Department of Homeland Security to put in place all necessary measures to protect America from this threat.”
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