New Orleans attackers: How false claims about the suspect spread islamophobia news
The suspected driver in the New Year’s Day truck attack in New Orleans was Shamsud-Deen Jabbar, 42, a United States citizen and U.S. Army veteran.
But within hours of the attack — which killed 15 people and is being investigated as an act of terrorism — President-elect Donald Trump, Republican leaders and social media influencers speculated that Jabbar had entered the U.S. illegally. Had done.
Citing Fox News, social media accounts on January 1 said that Jabbar “crossed the US-Mexico border at the Eagle Pass crossing just two days earlier” and that “the Biden administration has blood on its hands.”
US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia shared the 38-second Fox News clip and wrote on Twitter that Jabbar is said to have crossed the border at Eagle Pass two days ago!!! Close the border!!!”
The New Orleans terrorist attacker is said to have crossed the border at Eagle Pass two days ago!!!
Close the border!!!
Who is the bomb our government recently dropped that is raining it on innocent Americans?
– Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) 1 January 2025
Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter that Biden’s “farewell gift” to America was “immigrant terrorists”.
Biden’s farewell gift to America – migrant terrorists. https://t.co/PQBr8A6KDt
– Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) 1 January 2025
The president-elect wrote that “the criminals coming are far worse than the criminals present in our country”, referring to the attack on Truth Social on the morning of January 1.
At around 3 a.m. in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, law enforcement officials say Jabbar plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street with a rented Ford F-150 pick-up truck before being killed in a police shootout.
At least one Fox News broadcast on January 1, citing “federal sources”, reported that the truck had crossed the US southern border two days earlier and was driven by Jabbar.
Journalists broadcast it within minutes. The network issued a correction within an hour, saying that the truck had arrived in the country in mid-November and that Jabbar was not driving it.
But it was too late to stop the false claims that Jabbar was in the US illegally. PolitiFact contacted Fox News but did not hear back from the publication.
Here’s how misinformation about the suspect spread.
Fox News reporting timeline
As officials were working to confirm details about the attack, Fox News reported that the pick-up truck rented by Jabbar had entered the US through the Eagle Pass, Texas border crossing.
At 10:40 a.m. ET (15:40 GMT) on January 1, a Fox News reporter said that federal sources had license plate data placing the suspect and the truck at the southern border days before the attack:
“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate – okay, so this is coming to our newsroom right now, this is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt who are working on this from their federal sources. The suspect drives that truck with Texas license plates right through Bourbon Street. According to Spunt and Jenkins’ sources, the man drove through Eagle Pass, Texas two days earlier.
At approximately 10:47 a.m. ET (15:47 GMT), Fox News correspondent David Spunt clarified that reporters did not know whether Jabbar was driving the truck.
“We are hearing that the vehicle was detected coming into the United States from Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. Obviously, we don’t know 100 percent that this man, and we know the suspect is a man, was the same person who was driving him across the border. It’s unclear at this point,” Spunt said.
“All we know is that the actual license plate was picked up by a reader at the border crossing. That’s according to Fox News – two federal law enforcement sources – that it was caught crossing at the border station in Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. “I know this raises more questions than it answers, but we’re providing our viewers with the information we can get, the most accurate information, so this is what we know right now.”
Trump sent his Truth Social post about “criminals coming” at 10:48 a.m. ET (15:48 GMT).
At 11:55 a.m. ET (16:55 GMT), Fox News corrected the on-air timeline, saying that the truck had crossed the border in mid-November and confirming that it was not driven by Jabbar.
“Our sources now tell Fox that that truck passed through Eagle Pass, Texas not more than two days ago. It was crossed on November 16, and the identity of the driver who crossed the border suggests he is not the attacker,” said Fox News correspondent Brian Llanes.
PolitiFact found no examples of Fox News on-air personalities repeating the original false report in subsequent segments throughout the day.
Despite Fox’s correction, many of these erroneous posts remain online without explanation.
Trump continued to promote the false immigration angle in another Truth Social post on January 2, when law enforcement confirmed Jabbar was a US citizen.
“With Biden’s ‘open borders policy,’ I have said many times during rallies and elsewhere, that radical Islamic terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it is hard to even imagine or believe. It will be done,” Trump wrote. “The time has come, which is worse than ever thought.”
At a January 2 media briefing, Christopher Raya, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, said that Jabbar picked up an F-150 in Houston on December 30 and drove to New Orleans on the evening of December 31.
