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Tag: border crisis
New Orleans truck attack

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.

Whose Votes Does Biden Need To Win -- Hard Left Or Haley Republicans?

Whose Votes Does Biden Need To Win -- Hard Left Or Haley Republicans?

Barack Obama got it right. He refused to be held captive to his party's left wing. He adopted a strenuous policy of border enforcement, even as some Latino activists threatened to withhold their support for him. He had tense relations with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, but when anti-Israel protesters interrupted a Biden fundraiser over the Gaza conflict, Obama reprimanded them: "Here's the thing, you can't just talk and not listen." And the hall broke into applause.

Should Biden worry about keeping members of the Democrats' perpetually unhappy left on his team come November? Not to the extent that it costs broader public support — or goes against U.S. interests. The far left's power comes not in its big numbers but in its members' ability to bully Democrats into taking positions that cost them elections.

It's happened time and again. During the 2000 presidential campaign, prominent leftists urged followers to vote for spoiler Ralph Nader instead of the moderate Democrat Al Gore. A handful of Nader votes in Florida delivered the presidency to George W. Bush. In 2016, Bernie Sanders and many followers slashed the tires under Hillary Clinton's campaign, thus helping elect Donald Trump, who had cleverly egged them on.

Many of the disrupters waving Palestinian flags feel genuine despair at the Gaza horror. They have much company in this. But a lot of what they're after is attention. Getting pats on the head on social media is more important than helping defeat Donald Trump.

Exactly what was the point of pro-Palestinian demonstrators' disrupting an Easter Vigil mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral other than to get on the news? They know where the cameras are.

Come November, the hard left may deprive Biden of some needed votes. How much wiser to concentrate on Nikki Haley Republicans in the battlegrounds where moderate Republicans reside. And the Biden campaign is reportedly doing that.

According to a February Quinnipiac poll, 37% of Republican-leaning voters who supported Haley said they'd vote for Biden. That doesn't include the percentage of Republicans who would simply sit out an election that has Trump on the ballot.

Biden can't emphasize enough his support for the border enforcement bill that Trump had killed precisely because it would have worked, thus depriving him of a potent campaign issue. Any notion that this stance would turn off Latino voters is belied by polls showing Trump actually gaining some support among them as well as Blacks. And that's despite Trump's talking about mass deportations.

Perhaps Blacks and Latinos want different things from their political leaders than having their identities massaged. Other polls show illegal immigration — as well as crime — rank high on the list of these voters' concerns.

No surprise there. Poorly controlled borders intensify competition for workers without college degrees. These jobs are in construction, manufacturing, restaurants and hotels, retail — positions that are heavily occupied by people of color.

Contained in Obama's message to the anti-Israel left was the reality that the conflict in Gaza is complicated. But when you get down to the Squad level on the left, the problem isn't so much what many believe as their lack of depth in understanding the issues.

Trump Republicans can't help but love them. Here are would-be Democrats helping a candidate who, as president, introduced a ban on Muslims even entering the country — and says he would restore it in a second term.

Haley voters could well be the key to a Biden victory, especially if the president doesn't torment them with woke nonsense. Biden needs to keep Democrats united as is politically doable while getting the never-Trump Republicans to actually cast a vote — if not whole-heartedly for him, at least for the democracy.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

'Hellfire Missiles' For Mexico: Anti-Migrant Rhetoric Escalates At CPAC

'Hellfire Missiles' For Mexico: Anti-Migrant Rhetoric Escalates At CPAC

Anti-migrant rhetoric took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as right-wing pundits and politicians unleashed a torrent of xenophobia over the course of several days, signaling the central role that nativism will likely play in the 2024 presidential election.

With former President Donald Trump now the de facto Republican presidential candidate, the entire right-wing media ecosystem has embraced his signature anti-immigrant positions. At CPAC, which took place just outside of Washington, D.C., this week, speakers baselessly blamed migrants for a host of perceived social ills and proposed radical policies to punish them and their home countries.

Fox News contributor Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, pledged that his former boss would bomb Mexican drug cartels if given a second term.

“President Trump will declare them a terrorist organization, he will send a Hellfire rocket down there, and he’ll take the cartels out,” Homan said.

Even though launching missiles at the United States' neighbor and largest trading partner poses a number of obvious risks, Homan has long supported designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement to wage war against cartels on their home soil. Under Trump, Homan was one of the architects of the administration’s family separation policy, and he has extensive ties to the nativist Tanton network.

During a panel discussion about immigration, Homan — who has promised to return to government if Trump gets reelected and once again nominates him to lead ICE — repeated his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in the country’s history.

"For the millions of illegal aliens that have been released in this country — don’t get too comfortable, because we’re coming looking for you,” Homan threatened. “There has to be an historic deportation operation at the end of historic illegal immigration,” he added.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller made similarly extreme comments and repeated his call for the military to establish “large-scale staging grounds for removal” of migrants. In Miller’s telling, “You grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting.”

“The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border, and to say ‘No one can cross here at all,’” Miller added.

If a future Trump administration attempted to enact Miller’s policy wish list, it would almost certainly run into a number of legal, diplomatic, and logistical obstacles — not least of all that federal law bars the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles dismissed the central role immigration played in the development of the United States.

“We are told that we must tolerate the destruction of our borders, and the invasion of our country, because we are a nation of immigrants,” Knowles said. "As a matter of history, we are not, in fact, a nation of immigrants,” he added.

Knowles is exactly wrong, though he is correct that the United States has a long history of anti-immigrant bigotry.

Last year, Knowles said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” a comment he referenced in his speech this year, folding it into his anti-immigrant rant.

“We know the difference between a man and a woman,” Knowles said. “We know the difference between an American and everyone else.”

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and current hopeful to co-run the Republican National Committee, fearmongered about the “millions and millions of people flooding into our country illegally” across the southern border who have been “given a red carpet rollout and reception by Joe and Kamala."

Ben Carson, who served as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump, warned that immigration is an existential threat to the United States.

Carson asserted: “Our leaders are determined to repeat every mistake that led to the collapse of empires before us.” Among those mistakes, he cited “mass immigration and infiltration by foreigners who don't share our values and culture or even our language."

For months, Trump and his advisers have previewed extreme plans to deploy the military and use law enforcement to deport as many as 10 million people living in the United States without authorization. The speakers at CPAC are joining others in right-wing media in helping to lay the foundation for that horrifying proposition — to standing ovations from an audience that demands nothing less.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

US Mexico border fence

Republicans Only Exist To 'Fight,' Not To Make Policy

The border bill circus is the latest demonstration of a bedrock reality of today's Republican Party: It does not exist to achieve political outcomes. Its chief function is fan service.

The overriding concern of GOP voters, according to polls and to elected Republicans, is immigration. In the ranty precincts of the right, they believe that the southern border is open; that criminals, terrorists and drug dealers are crossing en masse. Among less febrile Republicans, the argument is that while legal immigration is good for the nation, we are swamped by illegal border crossers and must get control of a border that is out of hand.

Whichever version of the immigration argument they favor, every Republican who truly cared about solving the "crisis at the border" would presumably favor a bill that would have tackled — or at least ameliorated — the problem right now. In October, a group of senators including Shelley Moore Capito and Todd Young sent a letter to the president warning that 169 people on the terrorism watch list had been apprehended in the preceding 10 months. In early January, a 60-member delegation of House Republicans traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas. They were enraged, they said, by the fentanyl coming across the border.

In reality, fentanyl is mostly smuggled by American citizens, not would-be asylum seekers. Ninety percent of seizures occur at legal border crossings and interior vehicle checkpoints. In recent years, just 0.02 percent of people arrested for crossing the border illegally had any fentanyl in their possession.

Speaker Mike Johnson thundered that "One thing is absolutely clear: America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration." Rep. Mark Green, who yesterday announced his retirement from Congress, claimed that the FBI director had testified that members of Hamas can "just walk right in." But as The New York Times clarifies, Christopher Wray said no such thing. Rather, he explained in response to a tendentious question, that he could not 100 percent guarantee that none of those who evaded the border patrol ("get-aways") were members of Hamas.

While the risk of terrorists crossing the southern border is not zero, the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh has shown that the southern border is not a common vector for terrorists attempting to enter the United States.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that most Republicans are unfamiliar with Nowrasteh's research and fully believe the Mark Greens and Mike Johnsons of their party who claim that we are being overrun by terrorists and foreign drug smugglers, to say nothing of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of real Americans.

Would they not be outraged by their elected officials' decision to tank a border bill that would achieve many of their objectives? The base has not been shy about accusing Republican leaders of cowardice and betrayal over much less. Yet on this issue, supposedly the one they feel most passionate about, they are tamely accepting that GOP congressmen and senators passed up a unique opportunity to get much tougher enforcement just in order to give Trump a campaign issue?

Well, some might explain, the average Republican voter thinks that if Trump is reelected, they will get even better (i.e., harsher) measures to keep immigrants out. But that is false.

The only reason the Democrats are willing to agree to a lopsided border deal that gives Republicans 80 percent of what they demanded and get nothing in return (like a path to citizenship for Dreamers) is because Democrats are worried that the issue hurts them with voters — and since Republicans linked support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan to border security, Democrats would have to bend.

But that political calculation goes out the window if Trump is reelected. Democrats would not have any incentive to compromise.

So if GOP voters believe that illegals are flooding into the country to our sorrow and that we are in danger daily from infiltration by terrorists, how can they accept that Republicans would choose to continue this "unconscionable" status quo a day longer than necessary — much less the years it will likely take before another deal is possible? And if the Republican Party is a political entity, don't voters have a duty to understand political realities, including that this was a unique moment to achieve their cherished objective?

But if the party doesn't exist to solve political problems, if instead it exists only to "fight," then the voters' passivity makes sense. The GOP doesn't need to get control of the border, merely to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas. Lauren Boebert released a triumphant video after the (second) impeachment vote boasting that "Just now we impeached Secretary Mayorkas who has endangered our country by deliberately handing over control of our southern border to the cartel. Now that's delivering for the American people!"

No, that was a gross misuse of government power against an official that even the GOP's favorite legal advisers had said did nothing to merit impeachment. Besides, it was a pointless, empty gesture since the Democrats control the Senate and will certainly acquit him (as he deserves).

The show is everything. Results don't count, only the fight.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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