(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump sought to connect the New Orleans New Year’s Day terrorist attack to his tough-on-immigration doctrine weeks before he’s set to retake the White House — a sign that his stance on cross-border migration will include the flow of ideas and not just the physical movement of people.
“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. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.
Trump insinuated the perpetrator in the New Orleans attack was a foreign-born individual who had crossed the border from Mexico. However, investigators have named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a US citizen who served in the Army, as a suspect and said he was likely radicalized by terrorist group ISIS. Authorities said they discovered an ISIS flag with the Ford pickup truck that barreled through the crowd.
Trump’s continued attempts to link the attack — which killed at least 15 people and injured dozens more — to undocumented migrants sets the tone for what is likely to be a key focus for the early days of his White House.
Trump has pledged a large-scale overhaul of US immigration policy, promising to begin deporting scores of undocumented migrants when he takes office on Jan. 20. The first few months of his first term in the White House featured a travel ban on mostly Muslim countries.
One of the architects of that policy was Stephen Miller, who Trump has tapped to serve again in his second administration as a deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller echoed Trump’s comments linking terrorism and immigration.
“Islamist terrorism is an import. It is not ‘homegrown.’ It did not exist here before migration brought it here,” Miller posted on X on Wednesday night.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, said Thursday on Fox News that he’d been in touch with Jake Sullivan, his counterpart in the Biden administration, but added that it wasn’t enough to just rely on information provided by federal authorities. He also made the case for Trump’s national security appointees to be swiftly confirmed.
Tom Homan, whom Trump has named as his administration’s “border czar,” has pledged to quickly enact plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, focusing first on those who have committed crimes.
Homan has also floated the idea of using family detention centers for undocumented individuals and ending a practice that permits migrants to be free from detention while waiting on court proceedings. Homan, who helped design a much-maligned family separation policy for migrants during Trump’s first term, has said undocumented parents who have children who are citizens will have to decide between taking their children with them or leaving them in the US with a relative.
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