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

But within hours of the attack – which killed 15 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 US illegally.

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

US Representative for Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene 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!!!”

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Donald Trump Jr said on X that Biden’s “parting gift” to the US was “migrant terrorists”.

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

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

At least one Fox News broadcast on January 1 reported that the truck had crossed the US southern border two days earlier 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 US illegally. PolitiFact contacted Fox News but did not hear back by publication.

Here’s how misinformation about the suspect spread.

Fox News’ reporting timeline

As officials worked to confirm details about the attack, Fox News reported that the pick-up truck Jabbar rented came into the US at the Eagle Pass, Texas, border crossing.

At 10:40am ET (15:40 GMT) on January 1, a Fox News reporter said federal sources had licence plate data placing the suspect and the truck at the southern border days before the attack:

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“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas licence 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 licence plate right through Bourbon Street. According to their sources, to Spunt and Jenkins, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”

At about 10:47am ET (15:47 GMT), 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 percent 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 licence 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 10:48am ET (15:48 GMT).

At 11:55am ET (16:55 GMT), 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.

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“Our sources now tell Fox that that truck from Eagle Pass, Texas, did not cross two days ago. It crossed on November 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 on January 2, long after law enforcement confirmed Jabbar was a US 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 January 2 media briefing, Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said Jabbar picked up the F-150 in Houston on December 30 and drove to New Orleans on the evening of December 31.