‘The criminals coming in are far worse’: Trump falsely blames immigrants for New Orleans terrorist attack
A little after 3 AM on New Year’s Day, an armed gunman plowed a truck into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 and wounding dozens more. Donald Trump responded to the tragedy with a familiar tactic: he lied.
After Fox News mistakenly reported that an undocumented immigrant was responsible for the attack, Trump and other right-wing pundits flooded the internet with anti-migrant sentiment. In a post on Truth Social, the president-elect wrote “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,” echoing Fox News’ erroneous claim that the truck the gunman used in the attack had crossed into Texas from Mexico days before. Fox later retracted their statement.
According to a report from the FBI, the alleged perpetrator of the truck attack was “42 year old Army Veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas.” Jabbar was killed at the scene in a subsequent shootout with police. The FBI reportedly found an ISIS flag in the truck, and is currently investigating whether or not the Islamic State was involved in the attack.
Despite the fact that Jabbar was an American citizen, Trump used the attack as a means to enflame anti-immigrant sentiment in his base and score political points against his rivals in government. Anti-migrant rhetoric was a mainstay of the Trump campaign during the 2024 election, where the president-elect used increasingly xenophobic and violent rhetoric against migrants in order to stoke fear and attract votes. Trump’s epithets for migrants were myriad, calling them “animals” and “savages” who were “not human,” and were “poisoning the blood” of America. Trump later compounded on his xenophobic speech after announcing his “mass deportation” plan to forcibly remove millions of undocumented migrants from U.S. soil. Trump has also toyed with the notion of ending birthright citizenship, which grants citizenship to any person born in the United States regardless of their parents’ nationalities.
Right-wing figures in Trump’s orbit were quick to add fuel to the fire. In a statement on X, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green blamed the attack on “wide open borders” and “millions of gotaways” and attempted to link it to a vehicle attack that occurred in Germany during the holidays.
Meanwhile, Vice president-elect J.D. Vance reposted Trump’s Truth Social post to X, tacitly attempting lend credence to Trump’s claim that an illegal immigrant was behind the attack.
In a follow-up post, Trump claimed that Biden’s “Open Borders Policy” would leave American vulnerable to “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” echoing past attempts to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment. While Central and South America tend to be his primary focus, Donald Trump has extended his xenophobia to Islamic nations in recent months, and threatened to reinstate his “famous travel ban” which barred citizens from major Muslim nations from entering the United States.
While Fox News may have recanted their initial false statement on the New Orlean’s attack, Trump and his allies have not. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green’s statements on Twitter were flagged by fact checkers, but they are still up on the site.
For Trump and his allies, the facts of the attack are the least important part – they would rather use the tragedy in order to further their own political agenda, and their voters will likely support them.
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