United States President Donald Trump has suspended the green card lottery program.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X that at Trump's direction she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.
The development came days after a deadly shooting at the Brown University killed two students and wounded nine others.
The suspect in the shootings was identified as 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, who was also linked to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno Loureiro's death.
Valente had reportedly obtained legal permanent residence status in 2017.
Kristi Noem said that the suspected shooter entered the US through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) and later obtained a green card.
"This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country. 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," Noem wrote.