Last week, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner kept claiming that Pakistan is expelling 1.7 million Palestinian refugees from the country and questioned why pro-Palestinian activists were not talking about the news. In reality, Pakistan has announced it will expel hundreds of thousands of primarily Afghan refugees, not Palestinians (a whole different people, a whole different region), to its neighbor Afghanistan.

On November 16 – over a week after her repeated error – Faulkner corrected herself, saying she wants “to correct a factual error right here on the platform on which it was said, The Faulkner Focus, on Monday. I was wrong when I expressly said that Pakistan had expelled Palestinians.” She went on to explain the situation in Pakistan, but failed to note that she had made the same mistake two days later on both her shows. 

On the November 6, 2023, edition of Fox News’ The Faulkner Focus, the anchor asked Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce about why pro-Palestinian people in the U.S. are not protesting that Pakistan is supposedly kicking out Palestinians, saying, “Don't they care about the 1.7 Palestinians that are being, I mean, just expelled from Pakistan right now?” Faulkner continued with her rhetorical questions: “Why is that happening? Who is it happening to? Who is creating a corridor of safety for them to go where? Who wants them? Where will they go?”

Faulkner again mentioned the phantom “1.7 million Palestinians” in Pakistan on her show The Faulkner Focus on November 8, 2023, a day after the House passed a resolution to censure the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, for her pro-Palestinian stance. She aired clips from Tlaib’s November 7 speech in the House against the censure resolution, in which she had said, “The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.” As the video ended, Faulkner said, “Everybody has a heart for those suffering. She [Tlaib] needs to call the leader of Pakistan, where they’ve just expelled 1.7 million Palestinians.”

Faulkner repeated the claim later in the day on Outnumbered, again calling out Tlaib, saying that if she “really, really is brokenhearted about Palestinians, what in the world is she saying to the leaders of Pakistan? They have just expelled 1.7 million Palestinians with nowhere to go.” Faulkner called on Tlaib to take action, asking her to “call Pakistan. Get a home for your people. Call Jordan, call Saudi Arabia, call Iran.” Her co-host Kayleigh McEnany responded, “That’s a great point.”