Trump Exploits Brown University Shooting to Target Diversity Visa Lottery, Reviving Hardline Immigration Agenda

The Trump administration has once again perfected its signature move: take an unspeakable tragedy, flatten every inconvenient fact, and weaponize it into a blunt policy cudgel it has wanted to swing for years. Within hours of the Brown University shooting, the White House and DHS rushed to suspend the diversity visa lottery—a congressionally created program—despite the awkward detail that the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, entered the U.S. legally on a student visa in 2000, vanished from public records for more than a decade, and only later obtained a green card in 2017, during the first Trump administration, after extensive vetting. But why let timelines, laws, or logic get in the way of a good moral panic? In Trump-world, causation is optional, correlation is negotiable, and tragedy is merely an accelerant for long-standing ideological grudges. Continue reading “Trump Paused The Visa Lottery But The Facts Don’t Add Up”