Trump and Johnson have helped spread a false notion that the New Orleans attacker was an immigrant who entered the country illegally under Biden.Paul Sancya/AP
In the immediate aftermath of the New Year’s truck attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens in New Orleans, President-elect Donald Trump baselessly—and, it turns out, falsely—suggested that the Biden administration’s immigration policies were to blame.
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 10:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (Later in the post, he added: “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”)
While the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar—who died in a shootout with police—had proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS, according to the FBI, he was, in fact, a US citizen who grew up in Texas and served in the US Army. Trump has yet to clearly correct the record. In posts the following day, he faulted authorities for failing to protect “Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself,” and he argued: “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.”
When I asked if Trump would more directly correct his original false statement, the incoming president’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said I was “too big of a moron to actually comprehend what he was posting about.” Cheung suggested that Trump was referring to the broader problem of violent criminals and “radical Islamic terrorism” crossing the border.
Top members of the GOP have also spread version’s of Trump’s claim, attempting to connect Biden’s border policies to the attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did so on Fox News on Thursday, saying congressional Republicans “have been ringing the alarms” 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.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also posted on X, linking news of the attack to border and immigration policies. A spokesperson for Crane said Sunday that his post “simply says that our open border and legal immigration system create additional vulnerabilities to Americans, so there’s nothing to correct.” Spokespeople for Greene and Johnson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., echoed his father’s falsehoods in a New Year’s Day post on X, writing: “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists.”
As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday: “The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border.”
“The assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States and served in our armed forces. It is not an issue of the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says. https://t.co/rRMUv9vl3M pic.twitter.com/CdxBxDH9S1
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 5, 2025
The GOP, however, seems largely unwilling to back down. Instead, they continue to show they’re willing to sacrifice immigrants at the altar of Trump.
