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On Friday morning, at least three schools in Springfield, Ohio — a city at the center of racist fearmongering about Haitian immigrants — were hit with a bomb threat, forcing two to evacuate and one to close. This came just one day after Springfield City Hall was evacuated due to a bomb threat from someone claiming to be a resident and complaining about immigration. Haitian residents have said they fear sending their children to school and being victimised by property crimes.
The threat of violence that looms over the area is the result of a vile lie from leading Republicans about Haitian immigrants stealing pets and geese for food, a claim that managed to find its way from the dredges of the internet to the presidential debate stage. There is zero evidence that this has ever occurred in Springfield.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” former President Donald Trump bellowed from his lectern at Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, while tens of millions of viewers watched.
One thing is clear: If this continues, someone could get hurt — or worse. And yet, even as the threats and evacuations mount, Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance are refusing to call for calm. In fact, they are doubling down. Around 24 hours after Springfield City Hall closed due to a bomb threat, Vance posted on social media about immigration in Springfield, saying his followers should not “let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town.”
The crisis is hard to find. In recent years, as many as 20,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield while local officials promoted the city as offering good, steady jobs and affordable housing. Most of them are in the country legally, with many having temporary protected status, a designation that allows immigrants to escape violence in their nations of origin.
Though many rabid racists on the right have claimed that the city is falling into ruin because of the influx of migrants, the presence of the new residents has helped revitalise the city, boosting the economy and filling church pews. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has pledged $2.5 million to the city to help with the growing pains that come with a population explosion.
What should be a success story about how immigrants helped save a dying industrial town has been reduced to a talking point for right-wing politicians to spew hatred.
The rumor mill was already in motion Monday when Vance posted about the lie on social media.
“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote, referring to Harris. The following day he admitted that this was just a rumor — but said people should promote it anyway.
“Keep the cat memes flowing,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, an alarming number of Republican elected officials, including Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, have gleefully joined in to perpetuate the lie. Trump repeated the fake claim in Arizona on Thursday evening, and in California on Friday he said that Haitian immigrants were “destroying” Springfield residents’ way of life. He also pledged to conduct mass deportations from the town, saying that “we’re bringing them back to Venezuela,” referencing the wrong country. Trump’s persistence in making these claims indicates that they will probably become a part of his rally repertoire, which often includes references to fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter and other violent imagery about immigrants.
The Republican Party’s organization around hatred of immigrants came to the forefront with the 2016 presidential nomination of Trump, who launched his campaign that year by claiming Mexican migrants are “rapists.” He promised to build a wall to keep migrants out, and one of his very first acts as president was to ban travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.
But Trump, the Republican and America as a whole have long had a special kind of hatred for immigrants from Haiti specifically. Could it be because that nation became the first independent Black republic after successfully overthrowing its French colonisers?
Trump famously referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country in 2018. And Vance hasn’t limited his social media posts to the gross rumor about pets, but has also suggested that immigrants are spreading disease in Springfield (a claim that German Nazis made about Jewish people) and boosting crime rates.
Anybody with a conscience knows that this kind of language inspires violence all the time.
This wouldn’t even be the first time that Trump’s dangerous lies resulted in violence. After he lost the 2020 presidential election, he spent the months between his loss and Democrat Joe Biden’s inauguration riling his supporters with baseless claims about voter fraud. It caused his most ardent followers to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an event that left multiple people dead.
Trump and Vance are currently setting the stage for a similar outcome — and this time, it’s Vance’s own constituents who are being terrorised by his lies. Now that children are being forced to miss school in his state, he has a responsibility to renounce the claims he’s already admitted could be false, and to apologise.
Otherwise, if this ends in violence, Trump, Vance and everyone else who participated in this racist pile-on will have blood on their hands.