Trump blames immigrants for deadly attack by US citizen in New Orleans

President-elect Donald Trump rang in the New Year in a familiar way: using a news event in an attempt to build his case for stricter enforcement of the country’s southern border, a change he said is crucial to preventing let violent criminals flood the US.

After a van driver killed dozens of people in New Orleanskilling 14 people, in the early hours of January 1, Trump quickly issued a statement implying that the perpetrator had entered the country illegally.

He did not correct that statement and even intensified his rhetoric against “open border” with Mexico, after it soon became clear that an initial news report describing the attacker as an immigrant was wrong.

the driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, has been identified as an American raised in Beaumont, Texas, who served in the U.S. Army and who authorities say acted alone when he drove into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. The FBI said Jabbar was inspired by the Islamic Statea Sunni Muslim extremist group behind multiple terrorist acts for more than a decade.

Trump’s rhetoric and verbal broadsides followed a familiar pattern, according to analysts who follow his public pronouncements: combining hyperbole and false claims to bolster his campaign against illegal immigration, a cause he and his most ardent supporters describe as crucial to the security of the United States.

“This is his way of anticipating what he has been doing since his first race in 2016: that he is going to take extreme measures to defend the border,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications and journalism professor at Texas A&M University. “There is a permit structure taking place based on these threats, which suggests that they are not just imaginary but have already become reality. And he uses it as a way of saying, “Things are about to get very extreme.” “

Trump described recent immigrants as “much worse” criminals than those already living in the United States. That stance amounts to “rhetorical ammunition, to provide the basis on which he advocates doing what he wants to do anyway,” said Mercieca, author of “Demagogue for president: Donald Trump’s rhetorical genius”.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two advisers to Trump’s presidential campaigns also did not respond.

Fox News initially reported Wednesday morning that the rented truck used in the New Orleans attack had crossed the border into Mexico just two days before the Bourbon Street massacre.

Minutes later, Trump issued his first statement on the attack. “When I said that the criminals coming are much 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,” the statement read, in part. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that no one has seen before.”

Donald J. Trump Jr. quickly posted on social media platform X: “Biden’s parting gift to America: migrant terrorists.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted: “Close the border!!!”

Not long after, Fox News joined other outlets in reporting that the truck attack had been launched by an American citizen, Jabbar, not an immigrant. That correction did little to temper Trump’s fiery rhetoric.

“Our country is a disaster, the laughingstock of the whole world!” wrote the incoming president on Wednesday night. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective and practically non-existent leadership.”

In what may have been a concession to new information about Jabbar’s status as an American, not an immigrant, Trump criticized law enforcement for failing to protect Americans from “violent scum outside and inside.”

Statements by Trump and his supporters after the attack focused on Jabbar’s “otherness” and added disdain for the media and others who noted that Jabbar was a U.S. citizen, he said. Robert Rowland, professor of communications at the University of Kansas.

“In Trump’s mind, even though that person is an American citizen, he seems to reject Christianity and the military, and distance himself from those things that make him un-American,” Rowland said.

A photograph released by the FBI showing Shamsud-Din Jabbar an hour before driving a truck down Bourbon Street.

(FBI via Associated Press)

Many of Trump’s core supporters are working-class people who have expressed pronounced unease about demographic changes in the country, and the newcomers are perceived to be different from those who came before them, said Rowland, author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy”.

“There is extreme discomfort with the pace of social and cultural change,” Rowland said. “And the core group that has that feeling is, broadly speaking, the working class and, specifically, the white working class.”

One “Ugh,” wrote the X reviewer, “because we’d all hate to think that a non-citizen or illegal immigrant could ever harm innocent people.”

Trump and his team have not hesitated in the past to stoke fear about immigrants.

In his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated a claim, thoroughly debunked by multiple people and government officials, that Haitian migrants ate dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

The Republican presidential candidate never backed down from that statement. And his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, soon suggested that “firsthand accounts from my constituents” gave him reason to repeat the claim.

Although the stories about pet consumption had not been verified, Vance said they drew attention to the problem of American communities being overwhelmed by immigrants. (Haitians from around Springfield arrived there legally, authorities said.)

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” Vance said in an interview with CNN. “If I have to create stories to get the American media to really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The statements about dangerous immigrants are all part of a “very crude political calculation” designed to turn them into “objects of hate to then be attacked and ostracized,” Mercieca said. He acknowledged that “other people might have a more charitable reading” of Republicans’ intentions.

Republicans did not hesitate to amplify Trump’s words and say that they justified a crackdown on immigration. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) appeared on Fox News on New Year’s Day to protest the “open border” and “the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up terrorist cells.” potential throughout the country. “

Johnson, re-elected president on Friday, suggested that the House could try to reintroduce a bill similar to the one it passed in 2023. That legislation, killed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, would have expanded the wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. reimposed a policy of keeping asylum-seeking migrants in Mexico or in detention centers there and accelerated the deportation of unaccompanied children.

One day after the attack, Trump he refocused his attack on social networks on “radical Islamic terrorism,” saying that it and “other forms of violent crime will become so serious in the United States that it will be difficult to even imagine or believe.” That moment has arrived, only worse than we ever imagined.”

During his campaign he suggested he would resurrect a controversial travel ban on five Muslim-majority nations. The plan was modified after facing legal challenges. But Trump defended it on national security grounds and said he would now use it to ban refugees from the war in Gaza.

“Many of us expected him to act as president, rather than continue to exploit a tragedy to divide Americans and promote his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant agenda,” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Greater Los Angeles office.

“It’s fueling intolerance, fueling anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment,” Ayloush said, “which we’ve seen time and time again lead to violent attacks against allegedly Muslim people and immigrants.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, promoted the idea that the law was related to immigration.

“Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not “homegrown.” Miller posted on X after the attack. “It didn’t exist here before migration brought it here.”