Fox News stoked fears of terrorism to attack immigration reform while failing to acknowledge that the Senate's proposed immigration legislation includes provisions to bolster security measures.

The Washington Post reported the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing legally immigrated to the United States as political refugees. Fox News personalities responded by attacking immigration reform and stoking fears of terrorism, going so far as to suggest that visitors from certain countries and regions be banned from entering the United States.

On the April 30 edition of Fox & Friends First, co-host Heather Nauert continued Fox's pattern of using the Boston Marathon bombings to attack immigration reform and stoke fears of terrorism, asserting that terrorists are “being granted tourist visas.” She went on to claim that certain individuals were “overstaying” those legal limits, and asked: “Why isn't there a plan in place to catch that?”

She added:

NAUERT: Critics say it is a gaping hole that Washington needs to fix, and fix right now ... And let's remember some of those 9-11 hijackers were here on student visas and overstayed those student visas as well.

During the report, on-screen text falsely claimed the Senate's immigration reform proposal “gives no solution” to individuals overstaying their immigration visas:

In fact, the number of legal immigrants overstaying their visas declined by 73% between 2000 and 2009, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security's enhanced security measures in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The immigration reform bill introduced in the Senate on April 17 is designed to speed that decline by implementing what Republican Senator Marco Rubio called “an effective entry and exit system.”

Responding to questions about enforcement and temporary visas in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano described how provisions in the Senate immigration reform bill would “give us more measurements, more metrics, more identities, more things that we can use from a law enforcement purpose.”

Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev “initially escaped the notice of federal authorities on a six-month trip to Russia last year because his name was misspelled on his airline ticket,” The Washington Post reported. But Napolitano pointed out that the proposed electronic monitoring system is designed to specifically address that problem, as it “does a good job of getting human error, to the extent it exists, out of the process.”

CBS News reported that the bill's “modernized visa system” would monitor “the future traffic of immigrants during both departure and arrival to ensure that nobody overstays their welcome.” The summary of the bill's framework further details that the success of the full proposal is “contingent upon our success in securing our border and addressing visa overstays” and requires “the completion of an entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.”

Fox News has a history of pushing anti-immigrant sentiments, and previously attacked immigration policies by stoking fears of terrorism and distorting the facts about the 9-11 hijackers.