How a Fox News report fueled false claims about the New Orleans suspect. He was a US citizen.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old suspected driver in the New Year’s truck attack in New Orleans, was a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran.

But within hours of the attack — which killed 14 people and is being investigated as an act of terrorism — President-elect Donald Trump, Republican leaders and social media influencers speculated that Jabbar entered the U.S. illegally. 

Citing Fox News, social media accounts on Jan. 1 said Jabbar "crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at the Eagle Pass crossing just two days ago" and that there was "blood on the hands of the Biden administration."

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shared a 38-second Fox News clip and wrote on X that Jabbar "is said to have come across the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Shut the border down!!!" Donald Trump Jr. said on X that Biden’s "parting gift" to the U.S. was "migrant terrorists."

The president-elect referenced the attack on Truth Social the morning of Jan. 1, writing that "the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country."

Around 3 a.m. in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, law enforcement officials say that Jabbar rammed Bourbon Street crowds with a rented Ford F-150 pickup truck before he died in a police shootout.

At least one Fox News broadcast Jan. 1 reported that the truck had crossed the U.S. southern border two days before and was driven by Jabbar, citing "federal sources."

Reporters walked this back within minutes on air. The network issued a correction within an hour saying that the truck entered the country in mid-November and it wasn’t driven by Jabbar. 

But it was too late to contain false claims that Jabbar was in the U.S. illegally. PolitiFact contacted Fox News but did not hear back by publication.

Here’s how misinformation about the suspect spread.

As officials worked to confirm details about the attack, Fox News reported that the pickup truck Jabbar rented came into the U.S. at the Eagle Pass, Texas, border crossing.

At 10:40 a.m. ET on Jan. 1, a Fox News reporter said federal sources had license plate data placing the suspect and the truck at the southern border days before the attack:

"According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate — OK, so this is just coming into our newsroom, this is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working their federal sources on this, the suspect drives that truck with the Texas license plate right through Bourbon Street. According to their sources, to Spunt and Jenkins, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago."

Around 10:47 a.m. ET, Fox News correspondent David Spunt made clear that reporters didn’t know whether Jabbar was driving the truck.

"We’re hearing that the vehicle was traced to coming across from Mexico into the United States at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. 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 across the border. That is unclear at this point," Spunt said. "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 — that it was picked up crossing at that border station at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago. I know that raises more questions than answers but we are providing information to our viewers as we get it, the most accurate information, so that’s what we know right now."

Trump sent his Truth Social post about "the criminals coming in" at 10:48 a.m. ET.

At 11:55 a.m. ET, Fox News corrected the timeline on air, saying that the truck crossed the border in mid-November and confirmed that it wasn’t driven by Jabbar.

"Our sources now tell Fox that that truck from Eagle Pass, Texas, did not cross two days ago. It crossed on Nov. 16, and the identification of the driver that crossed the border does not appear to be the shooter," Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas said.

PolitiFact did not find 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 fan the inaccurate immigration angle in another Truth Social post Jan. 2, long after law enforcement confirmed Jabbar was a U.S. citizen. 

"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," Trump wrote. "That time has come, only worse than ever imagined."

In a Jan. 2 press 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.