Federal law enforcement officials have identified an Army veteran, who was born in the United States, as the sole person responsible for the Jan. 1 terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured many more. But some Republican politicians and social media posts have wrongly claimed or suggested that the attack was the result of illegal immigration.
An inaccurate report the morning of Jan. 1 from Fox News led some, including President-elect Donald Trump, to suggest a link to immigration at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Even after Fox News had corrected its report, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson continued to make statements suggesting an unsupported connection between the attack and illegal immigration.
In this article, we provide information currently known about the alleged attacker, and we cover what some Republicans have said about the attack.
What We Know About the Suspect
Authorities identified Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, of Texas, as the man who drove a Ford F-150 pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans shortly after 3 a.m. Central time on Jan. 1. Fourteen people were killed and more than 35 were injured, according to the FBI, which classified the incident as an act of terrorism.
Jabbar shot at police and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the FBI.
Jabbar was born in Texas, the FBI said. According to the Beaumont Enterprise, which interviewed family and high school classmates, he grew up in Beaumont, a small city near the Louisiana state line.
He joined the U.S. Army in 2007 and worked in human resources and information technology until 2015 when he joined the Army Reserve as an IT specialist, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army told FactCheck.org in a statement. He served in Afghanistan for about a year in 2009.
Jabbar had three marriages that each ended in divorce, according to research from ABC News, and he recently had been living in the Houston area.
In videos that Jabbar posted online in the hours before the attack, he said he had joined the Islamic State group before this summer, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia said at a Jan. 2 press conference.
On Dec. 30, Jabbar picked up an F-150 pickup truck in Houston that he had rented through the car-sharing app Turo and then drove to New Orleans on the evening of Dec. 31, Raia said.
Jabbar posted five videos to his Facebook account shortly before the attack, and he explained in one of them that “he originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned the news headlines would not focus on the ‘war between the believers and the disbelievers,’” Raia said.
Investigators also found an ISIS flag in the truck, and they initially considered that others may have been involved in the attack. The investigation, however, concluded that Jabbar acted alone, Raia said.
“We’ve had 24 hours now to go through media, to go through phones, to interview people, to analyze those videos, analyze other databases, and after all of that … we’re confident, at this point, that there’s no accomplices,” he said.
False Connection to Illegal Immigration
But federal authorities did not confirm that Jabbar was a U.S. citizen until after some inaccurate reporting from Fox News suggested that the attack may have been committed by someone in the country illegally.
Initially, a Fox News anchor, citing two of the network’s national correspondents, wrongly said that the suspect “came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.” Eagle Pass is on the border with Mexico. However, minutes later, one of the reporters the anchor mentioned in the segment, David Spunt, clarified that it was not clear that the suspect was the person driving the truck when it crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.
“To be clear, we don’t 100% know that this man … was the person driving that crossed the border. That is unclear at this point,” Spunt said. “We just know that the actual license plate was picked up by a reader at a border crossing. This is per two federal law enforcement sources to Fox News.” Spunt added that “the other thing that’s not entirely clear right now is the status, the immigration status of this driver.”
But Spunt incorrectly reported that the vehicle had entered the U.S. “two days” before the attack.
Despite Spunt’s caveats about the identity of the driver, the reporting led some Republican politicians to falsely claim or suggest that the attack was related to illegal immigration at the southern border.
Soon after the Fox News report, Trump posted on Truth Social: “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!” (Note: The U.S. violent crime rate isn’t at its highest level; it’s less than half the rates in the early 1990s.)
In addition, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who posted a 38-second clip from the Fox News report, wrote on X: “New Orleans terrorist attacker is said to have come across the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Shut the border down!!! Who did our government bomb lately that is taking it out on innocent Americans?”
In a post prior to that one, Greene wrote: “Terrorist attack in NOLA similar to the one in the German Christmas market. What did we expect would happen with wide open borders and millions of gotaways?”
More than an hour after the first Fox News report, Spunt updated his earlier reporting, adding that the truck the suspect was driving did enter the U.S. through Eagle Pass – but it was about two months ago, in November, not “two days ago.” He also said that he was told by his federal sources that the suspect “was not the person driving the truck” at the time.
“The truck did change some hands, so they’re working on the provenance of that truck and how it got to New Orleans,” he said.
But after Fox News corrected its earlier report, Trump and others continued to suggest a connection between the attack and illegal immigration.
In a Jan. 2 Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I 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 will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
In addition, on Jan. 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in two media appearances, wrongly linked the terrorist attack to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
“I don’t know if enough attention is being paid to this, but we all know that for the last four years, the Biden administration has been completely derelict in its duty,” Johnson said on “Fox & Friends” while discussing the attack. “The congressional Republicans, we here in the House and the Senate, have repeatedly asked the [Department of Homeland Security] under the Biden administration about the correlation, the obvious concern about terrorism and the wide open border. The idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country, we have been ringing the alarms. We impeached DHS Secretary Mayorkas in the House over that very issue and others related to it. So, this is a big concern.”
Later, on Fox Business, when host Larry Kudlow asked for Johnson’s thoughts on the attack, Johnson said that the Biden administration had “tried to convince us that the greatest threat to the homeland was racially motivated extremism, when we all looked at the wide open border and thought logically that that might lead to terrorist attacks in the future.”
We asked Johnson’s office why he has continued to suggest that the attack was connected to illegal immigration, but we have not received a response.
We posed the same question to Trump’s transition team, and we were sent the following statement from his communications director, Steven Cheung: “President Trump rightfully highlighted that criminals crossing the border have committed some of the most heinous crimes this country has witnessed in its history. That is a factual statement, and it is a big reason why Americans overwhelmingly voted for him and gave him a massive mandate. It is also true that radical Islamic terrorism and its warped ideology have crossed into our country and infected those looking to spread hate and violence.”
However, there is no indication that illegal immigration played a role in the Jan. 1 attack. As we said, the sole person accused of committing that crime was born in the U.S.
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