The ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on New Year's Day in New Orleans has raised fresh alarm about mass immigration and the state of U.S. national security under outgoing president Joe Biden.
The vehicle that Shamsud Din Jabbar used to murder more than a dozen people reportedly crossed the southern border in November.
Fox News was first to report that the truck entered the U.S. two days before the attack.
The network later retracted that timeline and said the truck crossed into America on November 16. It is also unclear if Jabbar was the one driving at that time.
In the aftermath of the Bourbon Street massacre, Trump is calling the attack a warning about the dangers of having a porous southern border.
“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 on New Year's Day.
Trump's critics have taken a victory lap after it came to light that the suspect was not an illegal immigrant, but a U.S.-born Army veteran.
Still, Trump and his allies have pointed to Jabbar's radical Islamist ideology as an example of a foreign threat that was "imported."
"Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not 'homegrown.' It did not exist here before migration brought it here," Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X.
The attack has brought new criticism of the FBI and its priorities under President Biden, who repeatedly claimed that domestic threats from white supremacists ranked at the top as dangerous criminal aliens poured across the border during his administration.
"The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job. They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself," Trump wrote in another post.
The FBI said Thursday that Jabbar likely acted alone, after officials initially suggested he may have had collaborators.
The man rented the truck on December 30 in Houston, authorities believe, before driving to New Orleans. An ISIS flag was found in the vehicle after the attack, and Jabar also released videos declaring allegiance to the group before the attack.
