Shamsud-Din JabbarThe 42-year-old suspected driver in the New Year’s Eve truck attack in New Orleans was a United States citizen and a US Army veteran.
But hours after 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 US illegally.
Citing Fox News, social media accounts said on Jan. 1 that Jabbar “crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at the Eagle Pass crossing just two days ago” and that there were “bloody hands on the hands of the Biden administration.”
U.S. Representative for Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene shared the 38-second Fox News clip and wrote on X that Jabbar “crossed the line at Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Close the border!!!”
The terrorist attacker from New Orleans reportedly crossed the border at Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!!
Close the border!!!
Who has our government bombed lately to shoot at innocent Americans?
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 1, 2025
Donald Trump Jr he said on X that Biden’s “farewell gift” to the USA was “migrant terrorists”.
Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists. https://t.co/PQBr8A6KDt
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 1, 2025
The newly elected president mentioned the attack on Truth Social on the morning of January 1, writing that “the criminals who are coming are far worse than the criminals we have in our country.”
Around 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day in New Orleans, law enforcement officials say Jabbar drove a rented Ford F-150 pickup truck into crowds on Bourbon Street before being killed in a police shootout.
At least one Fox News broadcast on January 1 reported that the truck had crossed the southern US border two days earlier and that Jabbar was driving it, citing “federal sources.”
The journalists brought this back within minutes on the air. The network issued a correction within the hour that the truck had entered the country in mid-November and was not being driven by Jabbar.
But it was too late to curb false claims that Jabbar was in the US illegally. PolitiFact reached out to Fox News but did not receive a response via publication.
Here’s how misinformation about the suspect was spread.
Timeline of Fox News coverage
As officials worked to confirm the details of the attack, Fox News reported that the pickup truck Jabbar rented entered the U.S. at the Eagle Pass border crossing in Texas.
At 10:40 a.m. ET (15:40 GMT) on January 1, a Fox News reporter said federal sources had license plate information that showed the suspect and the truck had been at the southern border in the days before the attack:
“According to federal sources, the suspect was driving a truck with that Texas license plate — OK, so this is coming into our newsroom right now, this is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working on this with their federal sources, the suspect is driving that truck with a Texas license plate through Bourbon St. According to their sources, Spunt and Jenkins, this person passed through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”
Around 10:47 a.m. ET (15:47 GMT), Fox News correspondent David Spunt made it clear that reporters did not know if Jabbar was driving the truck.
“We are hearing that the vehicle was tracked coming from Mexico into the United States in Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. To be clear, we don’t know 100 percent that this is a man, but we do know that the suspect is a man, the person who drove it across the border. That’s unclear at this point,” Spunt said.
“We only know that the real license plate was picked up by a reader at the border crossing. That’s according to Fox News, according to two federal law enforcement sources – that he was caught at the border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. I know it raises more questions than it answers, but we provide our viewers with information as we get it, the most accurate information, so this is what we know right now.”
Trump sent his Truth Social post about the “coming of criminals” at 10:48 ET (15:48 GMT).
At 11:55 ET (16:55 GMT), Fox News has corrected the timeline on air, saying the truck crossed the border in mid-November and confirmed it was not driven by Jabbar.
“Our sources are now telling Fox that that truck from Eagle Pass, Texas didn’t make it two days ago. He crossed on November 16th, and the identification of the driver who crossed the border does not appear to be the killer,” Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas said.
PolitiFact found no instances of Fox News on-air personalities repeating the original erroneous report in subsequent segments throughout the day.
Despite Fox’s correction, many of these erroneous posts remain online without clarification.
Trump continued to push the incorrect immigration angle in the second Truth Social post on January 2, long after police had confirmed that Jabbar was an American citizen.
“With Biden’s ‘Open Border Policy,’ I have said, many times at 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,” Trump wrote. “That time has come, only worse than one could imagine.”
In a Jan. 2 news briefing, Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said Jabbar picked up the F-150 in Houston on Dec. 30 and drove to New Orleans on the evening of Dec. 31.
