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Fox Still Falsely Linking Migrants To New Orleans Truck Attack

After a truck-ramming attack killed at least 14 people at a New Year's celebration in New Orleans, Fox News misreported that the vehicle used came across the southern border two days earlier, implying that the suspected perpetrator — later identified as an Army veteran born in the U.S. — had also crossed the border.

Although the network has seemingly attempted to quietly walk back the false information, Fox personalities and guests — including some former and incoming Trump administration picks — have continued to baselessly connect an act of terror reportedly committed by a U.S. citizen to the southern border in order to fearmonger about terrorists entering the country.

After a deadly truck attack in New Orleans, Fox News quickly sought to tie the attack to the southern border

- On January 1, a truck rammed into a New Year's celebration along Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens others before the driver was killed in a shootout with police. The truck was rented through the vehicle-sharing app Turo, and was driven to New Orleans from the Houston area. [ABC News, 1/1/25; ABC 13-KTRK, 1/1/25]
- Fox News initially reported during the 10 a.m. hour that “anonymous sources” claimed that the truck used in the attack had crossed the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days prior to the attack. Shortly after, Fox senior national correspondent Aishah Hasnie walked back the claim, posting at 11:55 a.m. ET that the truck “crossed Eagle Pass, TX on November 16th -- not two days ago. The identification of driver that crossed border does not appear to be the shooter.” A Fox News article also quietly removed any mention of the border in an article which originally reported that the truck used “was tracked crossing the southern border into the U.S. at Eagle Pass, Texas, in November.” [CNN, 1/2/25; Twitter/X, 1/1/25; Fox News, 1/1/25, archived 1/1/25]
- President-elect Donald Trump spread Fox News’ faulty reporting by posting the same misinformation minutes after the network reported it. Trump posted to 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.” [Media Matters, 1/2/25]

After Fox walked back its reporting, network figures continued to fearmonger about “potential terrorists” crossing the southern border

- Fox host Julie Banderas shifted focus to the southern border by claiming that “the license plate on this truck has a history of plate readers at the border in patterns that, and I’m quoting, ‘may be suspicious for human smuggling.’” Banderas added: “When you hear human smuggling, you think about the border, and the border has obviously been such a dangerous, ignored problem for this country with so many of these sleeper cells and terrorists who want to harm Americans, illegally crossing our borders.” [Fox News, Fox News Live, 1/1/25]
- Fox News national correspondent Griff Jenkins claimed the attack is “raising new concerns about the terror threat across the country, including at our southern border,” before interviewing Trump’s border czar Tom Homan. Jenkins said: “The New Orleans terrorist suspect, a U.S. Army vet carrying an ISIS flag from his truck's trailer hitch, is raising new concerns about the terror threat across the country, including at our southern border — where just months ago, eight Tajikistan nationals with ISIS ties were arrested in several major U.S. cities after entering illegally.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/2/25]
- After reporting that the suspect was a U.S. citizen who drove from Texas, Fox’s Todd Piro asked his guest, “Would you say we are at pre-9/11 threat level specifically because of Joe Biden's border policies — in other words, is there an extensive ISIS threat in our homeland?” His guest, former Trump Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Fahey, responded: “We don't really know what that threat is but I do think Biden's border policies — whether or not it had anything to do with this, where it doesn't seem like it did — but it does create the perception we do not have a secure border and a secure country, and that this administration is more concerned about advancing their political agenda than they are about protecting public safety and national security.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends First, 1/2/25]
- On Hannity, Homan claimed Biden “bragged” that the New Orleans attacker is a U.S. citizen and said that the border was the “biggest” national security threat. Homan added, “I wouldn't hang his hat on these attacks being done by U.S. citizens. It's coming. Even [FBI Director] Christopher Wray ... said the southern border has the biggest national security vulnerability he's ever seen.” Guest host Tammy Bruce also warned, “Now we have millions of people, we don’t know who they are, hundreds of people — regarding the terrorist watchlist, people who are dangerous, who are roaming about.” [Fox News, Hannity, 1/1/25]

Discussing Biden’s remarks about the attack on The Ingraham Angle, guest host Jason Chaffetz said that “it was odd how much emphasis he gave to the fact that he was a United States citizen.” Nathan Sales, a former counterterrorism coordinator under Trump, stated that Biden “almost seemed relieved that the perpetrator was an American citizen because if this guy had actually illegally come to the United States across our southern border, he would have a lot to answer for.” Sales added, “Today, the person who committed this attack was indeed an American citizen, but let’s indeed not take our eyes off the bigger picture here, which is that over the past four years, millions of people have come into the country. We have no accountability for who they are, and we have to take seriously the risk — the threat that some of these people may be here to do us harm.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/1/25]
During a segment discussing the attack, The Five co-host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery mentioned “hundreds, maybe thousands of people associated with, you know, groups from ISIS-K to Al-Shabaab in this country illegally, potentially gotaways we don't even know about.” Co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that “there are two stories being told about this perpetrator, one that ... this was a home-grown American terrorist" and “then there is another narrative that is being boosted by people who want to make a case about open borders, that this is someone who, you know, flew through Eagle Pass, drove to New Orleans and tried to kill a bunch of people. That's obviously not what happened here.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/2/25]
Former acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf accused the Biden administration of not responding to the reported heightened threat environment, “whether it’s along the border, whether it’s vetting more individuals coming in.” Anchor Trace Gallagher added that everyone took FBI Director Christopher Wray’s terror warning seriously “because we had seen this crush of people coming across the border that we did not know.” [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 1/2/25]
During a straight news panel discussion about the attack, Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared that Trump “has got to find those people who snuck into our country and deport them.” [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 1/2/25]

Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt responded to the New Orleans attack and the Las Vegas explosion by casting suspect on migrants: “What else don't we know? If these are a couple of people who are homegrown, what don't we know of all of these people who’ve come across the border?” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/2/25]
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed the New Orleans attack on soft-on-crime and open border policies. Pompeo claimed, “When America fails to lead, when you don't engage in solid law enforcement and enforcing criminal laws, when you can't secure your borders, when you refuse to call out radical Islamic terrorism and punish it, you get the events of October 7, you get the events of just this past week in New Orleans.” Pompeo later fearmongered about migrants crossing the southern border, saying, “We’ve also seen a couple of hundred folks that are on the terror watch list come across our southern border. We don't have any earthly idea where many of these folks are.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/2/25]
Former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien complained that “we’ve had a wide-open border for four years” and “hundreds of thousands of gotaways,” claiming that “bad guy central, it’s here in America.” A chyron reading “New Orleans attacker ‘inspired by ISIS’” aired during the segment. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/2/25]
On Hannity, guest Brett Tolman mentioned a “porous immigration border” and predicted foreign attackers “will be actually rallied and they’re going to be inspired” by the New Orleans attack. [Fox News, Hannity, 1/2/25]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Together Again: Fox And Trump Spread Lies About New Orleans Truck Attack

President-elect Donald Trump keeps falsely suggesting that the native-born U.S. Army veteran who rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Year’s Day was an immigrant. He appears to have been misled by a Fox News report — subsequently retracted — alleging that the assailant crossed the border from Mexico two days before the attack.

The falsehoods mark a resumption of the Trump-Fox feedback loop that powered his communications during his first term in the White House. The then-president, an obsessive consumer of Fox programming, sent nearly 1,300 tweets in response to coverage he saw on Fox News and Fox Business over the last 29 months of his tenure.

At around 3:15 a.m., the driver of a pickup truck sped through a crowd of revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more before being killed in a shoot-out with police. The driver was later identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran born and raised in Texas who claimed to have joined ISIS.

But at 10:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday — before authorities had confirmed the suspect’s name — Fox aired an anonymously-sourced bombshell report claiming that he had crossed the border from Mexico earlier that week.

“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate, OK — so this is just coming into our newsroom now. This is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working their federal sources on this,” anchor Molly Line said. “According to their sources, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”

Within minutes, Trump amplified Fox’s incendiary claim, arguing that the New Orleans attack showed he had been correct about “criminals coming in” to the U.S.

“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,” he posted to his Truth Social platform at 10:48 a.m. “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.”

But as Trump parroted Fox’s reporting, the network’s reporters were walking it back, saying that the sources only confirmed that the truck, and not the suspect, had crossed the border earlier in the week.

“We’re hearing that the vehicle was traced to coming across from Mexico into the United States at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago,” Spunt told Fox’s audience at around the same time Trump posted.

“To be clear, we don’t 100% know that this man — and we do know the suspect is a man — was the person driving that crossed the border,” he continued. “That is unclear at this point. 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."

“I know that raises more questions than answers, but we are providing information to our viewers as we get it, the most accurate information,” Spunt added.

But Fox had not carefully provided its viewers — including the former president — with “the most accurate information."

Roughly an hour later, a Fox anchor reported that the network’s sources had confirmed that the pickup truck actually crossed the border at Eagle Pass on November 16 — nearly two months ago, not two days — and that the driver at the time had not been the suspect. The car-sharing company Turo later confirmed that the suspect had rented the truck used in the attack.

A few hours after that, as more information about the suspect came out, Spunt ended up in the curious position of correcting the false Trump claim that his own reporting had seemingly spurred. Spunt read the Truth Social statement during the 4 p.m. ET hour and commented, “Now, the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in his statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear, Molly and Brian, the suspect was born in the United States.”

The correction did nothing to deter Trump, who posted overnight that “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS” and blamed Democrats “for allowing this to happen to our Country.”

By the following morning, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was on Fox & Friends explaining that the attack demonstrated the need to “close the border, secure our sovereignty.”

Minutes after that, Trump posted that the attack by a native-born citizen had proven him correct about the border. “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,” he wrote.

Trump appears to be starting his second term the same way he spent his first one — by riffing on what he sees on his television.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Chef Andrés Mobilizing Relief For Ida And Afghan Evacuees

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

World-famous chef and humanitarian José Andrés says that his World Central Kitchen organization has three kitchens set up in Louisiana and is prepared to distribute 100,000 meals in Ida's aftermath. The hurricane—one of the strongest to ever hit the mainland U.S.—has left more than one million residents without power.

"Tomorrow morning as soon as it is safe our teams will go out, will start making meals, will start delivering to the different places that will be in need to do that," the chef told CNN on Sunday evening. "But more important: we need to be planning ahead, not only for days, but for weeks." The chef said a focus of World Central Kitchen would be to ensure both residents in New Orleans and across the state are fed.

A tweet from World Central Kitchen early Sunday morning showed relief workers and volunteers preparing hundreds of sandwiches at the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute. "Entering the storm with more supplies," replied Kyle Pounders, chef and owner of Excaliburger in Arkansas. That same morning, José Andrés said that "after the storm passes, we can do what we always do: go to other cities and very quickly fire up the kitchens that we have in position there."

The chef traveled to New Orleans following humanitarian efforts in Haiti, where an Aug. 14 earthquake killed 2,000 people and left thousands more homeless. "WCK's roots began in Haiti in 2010," the group's website said. "In January of that year, the country was hit with an absolutely devastating earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people—and a decade later communities in Haiti are still recovering."

Much of that sentence could have easily have been written today, as the nation struggles to recover from both political instability following President Jovenel Moïse's assassination in July, and the 7.2 earthquake last month. "With a team already in Haiti, additional WCK relief workers began arriving in the country the day after the quake," the Miami Herald reports. A kitchen set up in Les Cayes has been feeding more than 10,000 people daily. The report said the organization hopes to soon double that number.

"This is really tough; it's tough in a different way than from the 2010 earthquake, which caused such massive devastation in Port-au-Prince," World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook told the Miami Herald. "Here, the impact is spread so far out in these rural communities that are very hard to reach with small pockets of people in need … But we are going to be here as long as we're needed."

World Central Kitchen has also been providing meals to newly arrived Afghan refugees at Dulles Airport in Virginia. Mook told WJLA on Friday that some refugees evacuated from Afghanistan haven't eaten for as long as two days. "It's a very long journey as they've gone from a number of bases, getting processed and then finally arriving at Dulles Airport," he said in the report. In a tweet, José Andrés said that "[w]hat's happening in Afghanistan breaks my heart … but the outpouring of support from people across America helps glue it back."

Hurricane Ida Rivals Katrina's Strength Ahead Of LouisianaLandfall

New Orleans (AFP) - Louisiana braced Sunday for Hurricane Ida, a powerful Category 4 storm on course to slam into New Orleans 16 years to the day after deadly Hurricane Katrina devastated the southern US city.

Showers and strong wind swept New Orleans' deserted streets Sunday morning, buffeting boarded-up windows at businesses and homes surrounded by sandbags.

State Governor John Bel Edwards said Ida, which has gathered force on its approach through the warm waters of the Gulf, could be the most powerful storm to hit the state since 1850.

By midday Sunday, storm surges were already flooding the town of Grand Isle, on a barrier island south of New Orleans, CNN reported.

Amid urgent warnings of catastrophic damage, most residents have heeded authorities' instructions to flee. Scores of people packed bumper-to-bumper roads leading out of New Orleans in the days preceding Ida's arrival.

The hurricane, packing maximum sustained winds of 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour was expected to make landfall along the southeastern Louisiana coast "within the next few hours," the National Hurricane Center reported in its 1500 GMT advisory.

In one neighborhood in eastern New Orleans, a few residents were still completing last-minute preparations.

"I'm not sure if I'm prepared," said Charles Fields, who was still bringing his garden furniture indoors, "but we just have to ride it."

The 60-year-old, who in 2005 saw Hurricane Katrina flood his house with 11 feet (3.3 meters) of water, added that "we'll see how it holds up."

'Very Serious Test'

Governor Edwards warned on Sunday that Ida would be "a very serious test for our levee systems."

He told CNN that hundreds of thousands of residents were believed to have evacuated.

The storm "presents some very challenging difficulties for us, with the hospitals being so full of Covid patients," he said.

The southern state, with a low rate of vaccinations, has been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, severely stressing hospitals. Hospitalizations, at 2,700 on Saturday, are near their pandemic high.

The memory of Katrina, which made landfall on August 29, 2005, has not begun to fade in Louisiana, where it caused some 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

"It's very painful to think about another powerful storm like Hurricane Ida making landfall on that anniversary," Edwards had previously said.

Rainfall of 10 to 18 inches (25 to 46 centimeters) is expected in parts of southern Louisiana through Monday, with up to 24 inches in some areas.

Ida And Delta Variant

The White House said Sunday that federal agencies had deployed more than 2,000 emergency workers to the region -- including 13 urban search-and-rescue teams -- along with food and water supplies and electric generators. Extensive and long-lasting power outages are expected.

Local authorities, the Red Cross and other organizations have prepared dozens of shelters with room for at least 16,000 people, the White House added. Plans to cope with the hurricane -- and plans for the shelters -- have been complicated by Covid-19. President Joe Biden, who has declared a state of emergency for Louisiana, on Saturday urged anyone in community shelters to wear masks and maintain distance.

Scientists have warned of a rise in cyclone activity as the ocean surface warms due to climate change, posing an increasing threat to the world's coastal communities.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Fox Still Falsely Linking Migrants To New Orleans Truck Attack

After a deadly truck attack in New Orleans, Fox News quickly sought to tie the attack to the southern border

After Fox walked back its reporting, network figures continued to fearmonger about “potential terrorists” crossing the southern border

Together Again: Fox And Trump Spread Lies About New Orleans Truck Attack

Chef Andrés Mobilizing Relief For Ida And Afghan Evacuees

Hurricane Ida Rivals Katrina's Strength Ahead Of LouisianaLandfall

'Very Serious Test'

Ida And Delta Variant

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