U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024.
Cheney Orr | Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump and his allies in Congress have blamed the lethal New Orleans truck assault on President Joe Biden’s border insurance policies though the attacker was a U.S. citizen.
“When I mentioned that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals now we have in our nation, that assertion was always refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, nevertheless it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social as info was nonetheless trickling out in regards to the ramming assault on Wednesday morning.
“The crime fee in our nation is at a degree that no one has ever seen earlier than,” he wrote. “Our hearts are with all the harmless victims and their family members, together with the courageous officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”
Officials later recognized the attacker as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, of Texas, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran.
Fox News had reported Wednesday morning that the suspect, who was shot and killed by police after he ran over a crowd of individuals on New Orleans’s well-known Bourbon Street, had crossed over the border from Mexico earlier this week. The network walked back its reporting later Wednesday, however not earlier than Trump and a few of his allies echoed it.
Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s eldest son, posted a information article in regards to the misguided report, saying, “Biden’s parting reward to America — migrant terrorists.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted shortly after the initial segment, “New Orleans terrorist attacker is alleged to have come throughout the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Shut the border down!!!”
Later Wednesday, Fox News quoted Trump’s Truth Social posted after which famous, “To be clear, the suspect was born within the United States.”
Despite Fox’s clarifications, Trump doubled down on his message Thursday in posts on Truth Social, saying that the Biden administration’s dealing with of the nation’s borders has led to “a violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy.”
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I mentioned, many occasions throughout Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and different types of violent crime, will develop into so unhealthy in America that it’ll develop into laborious to even think about or consider,” he wrote in another post. “That time has come, solely worse than ever imagined.”
Other Republicans did not straight reference Fox’s authentic report, however nonetheless appeared responsible the state of affairs on the border for the assault and used the chance to push the bigger GOP platform of a weak border harming nationwide safety.
FBI investigators arrive on the scene the place the white Ford F-150 pickup truck that crashed into a piece elevate after allegedly driving right into a crowd of New Year’s revelers within the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 1, 2025.
Matthew Hinton | Afp | Getty Images
In an look on Fox News, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday additionally sought to painting the assault as a border safety failure, mentioned that congressional Republicans had been “ringing the alarms” about “the concept that harmful individuals had been coming right here in droves and organising doubtlessly terrorist cells across the nation.”
Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., wrote in response to images of the dead suspect on X Wednesday that the “open border,” the nation’s immigration system and Congress’ inaction on the problem “have created the right storm to hazard Americans.”
Similarly, Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., shared on X a video of an interview he did Wednesday in regards to the terror assault and wrote, “We should safe the border & assure our native enforcement is empowered to implement the legislation and defend the American individuals from these cowards!”
NBC News reported earlier this 12 months that about 0.014% of migrants who had tried to cross the border in fiscal 12 months 2024, or fewer than 2 out of each 10,000, had been on the terrorist watchlist. The whole quantity who’ve tried to cross in the course of the Biden administration is simply over 1,700. During the Trump presidency, it was 1,400.
A consultant for Trump’s transition group didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark Thursday. The places of work of Greene, Johnson, Gimenez and Crane additionally didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. Fox News additionally didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
