Will Indians be hit by US pause on green card lottery system? All you need to know

The Donald Trump administration on Friday paused its Diversity Visa (DV1) Program, better known as the green card lottery system, alleging that a violent criminal from a recent shooting came into the US via this route.

In an X post on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that she had instructed the US Citizenship and ​Immigration Services (USCIS) to "immediately" pause the DV1 programme, after orders from the US president.

Though she claimed that the Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had entered the US via a DV1 visa, she was fact-checked by netizens, citing reports that he had come into the US via a student visa in 2000, and obtained permanent residency 17 years later.

Valente, who is also suspected of having killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro earlier this week, should "never have been allowed in our country", she said.

"In 2017, President Trump fought to end this programme ... At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 programme to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme," Noem added.

Will Indians be affected?

The green card lottery system, which makes up to 50,000 green cards available in the US, is only for people from countries that are little represented in the US, as per the USCIS website.

India, however, has had far more than 50,000 people—the eligibility cap—emigrating to the US over the past five years. This automatically makes Indians ineligible for DV1 visas (till 2028) anyway.

In 2021, 93,450 Indians emigrated to the US, as per an NDTV report. This jumped to 1.27 lakh people in 2022, but steeply declined to 78,070 people in 2023.

Other nations that don't qualify for DV1 visas for 2026 include China, South Korea, Canada, and Pakistan.