The Egregious Republican Lie About Ohio’s Migrants
The Egregious Republican Lie About Ohio’s Migrants
The claim that Haitians are eating household pets is the most blatantly racist presidential campaign stunt in decades.
When Donald Trump sensationally accused Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrants of stealing and barbecuing their neighbors’ household pets during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, the story was already national news. The day before the debate, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, who had already been murmuring about the community in the months prior, catapulted the new allegations into the national spotlight.
While these claims have been thoroughly debunked, the story refuses to go away—largely because Trump supporters keep trying to spin the fiasco in his favor. In the most recent chapter, Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy showed up in Springfield for a town hall meeting where he brushed aside questions about the racist hoax spread by Trump and Vance and pushed a subtler xenophobic narrative blaming immigration-friendly policies for local problems.
It all started with an X hatefest I happened to catch at the outset. On September 7, a full three days before the debate, I saw a post from misinformation superspreader End Wokeness (an account that may be run by far-right troll and Pizzagater Jack Posobiec), containing what seemed like an obviously made-up story: “ducks and pets” in Springfield, Ohio being gobbled up by Haitian migrants. The evidence? An anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her lost cat being carved up by the Haitians next door.
I decided to post a sarcastic comment, unaware that I was wading into a dumpster fire:
In response, my replies were inundated with racist and antisemitic posts:
Some users tried to “own” me by sharing a video of an Ohio woman apparently killing and partially eating a cat in August. Relatively big names like anti-woke obsessive Wesley Yang and right-wing anti-immigration crusader Nate Hochman (who got fired by Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign for sharing a video prominently and favorably featuring a Nazi “sonnenrad”) rebuked me for not acknowledging the video as corroboration. Never mind that the incident happened in Canton (some 175 miles from Springfield) and involved a lone, clearly mentally ill woman, not a family calmly carving up a kitty carcass in its front yard. Oh, and also: there was no evidence that the woman was Haitian or an immigrant. In fact, she was later confirmed to be a Canton native.
What I didn’t know is that “They’re eating pets!” was just the latest in far-right attempts to whip up an anti-Haitian panic. As Robert Tracinski has pointed out in The UnPopulist, “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because [the neo-Nazi group] Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians for a year now.”
Enter J.D. Vance, boosting the rumors that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country” (consistently rebutted by Springfield police and the Republican city government) in an obvious ploy to harness anti-immigrant animus for electoral gain. In days after Trump picked up the cause before a national TV audience, Vance both defended the pet-eating claim on the basis of supposed accounts by “constituents” and shifted the goalposts by asserting that the real point of the story was to draw attention to “the suffering of the American people” in places like Springfield that legacy media had been allegedly ignoring.
So what’s really going on in Springfield?
Contrary to Vance’s claims of media silence, The New York Times did an in-depth report on Springfield four days before the rumor started spreading on X. The piece reported that the influx of Haitians, while revitalizing the town, had also created pressures on “housing, schools, and hospitals,” including a spike in Haitian patients at a health clinic from 115 in 2021 to 1,500 in 2023, an increase in costs for translation services at the same clinic from $43,000 in 2020 to an estimated $436,000 in 2024, growing expenditures on language programs in schools for Haitian students, and a rise in rents.
As the Times noted, many of these tensions exploded in August 2023 after a school bus crash caused by a Haitian immigrant in which an 11-year-old boy was killed and nearly two dozen other children injured. Multiple grievances and suspicions were vented at city commission meetings. (The boy’s father recently implored “morally bankrupt politicians,” including Trump and Vance, to stop using his son’s death “for political gain.”)
But what about the other right-wing claims? Are the Haitians undercutting local workers because they’ll work for low wages, perhaps thanks to government subsidies? Are they pushing out local low-income renters because of a government program that pays the landlords? Doesn’t seem like it: the Haitians, legal immigrants who are mostly in the Temporary Protected Status program introduced under George H.W. Bush, have work permits and generally work at market rates, and there is no indication that they get housing subsidies. (Most people with Temporary Protected Status are not eligible for federal housing assistance.)
The journalists Kevin Williamson and Radley Balko have both done deep dives into the story of Springfield’s Haitians. The migrants haven’t been “shipped to” or “dropped on” the city by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—language that drips with contempt for the agency and humanity of migrants. They often came from other locations in the U.S. such as Florida, after learning that jobs were available and rents were low; Springfield had been actively trying to attract employers and workers, including immigrants, since 2014. The Haitians haven’t depressed local wages—quite the opposite. Nor have they caused a surge in disease or crime (a time-dishonored racist trope). Generally speaking, Haitian immigrants in the United States tend to do quite well on a variety of measures from employment and children’s educational attainment to crime.
Of course, the picture in Springfield isn’t entirely sunny, even apart from the strain on schools and social programs. Williamson notes that even enthusiastic supporters of the Haitians complain about poor driving by migrants who are either inexperienced or unfamiliar with U.S. traffic laws. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who has been generally supportive of the immigrants, recently directed the state highway patrol to “address the increase in dangerous driving in Springfield by inexperienced Haitian drivers and all others who disregard traffic laws” as part of a package of measures to help both the migrants and the city.
Still, whatever real migration-related problems there may be, the backlash has often taken the form of blatant and raw bigotry. Tracinski and others have documented the role of Blood Tribe, an actual neo-Nazi group, in amplifying this bigotry. On August 10, about a dozen Blood Tribe members held an “anti-Haitian immigration march” in downtown Springfield, waving swastika flags; on August 27, a member of the group, using a racist pseudonym, spoke at the Springfield City Commission meeting to declare that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in” (he quickly got himself ejected for using threatening language.)
But set aside the Nazis and take a look at what a local Republican activist named Glenda Bailey, at the forefront of the anti-migrant backlash, has said at City Commission meetings. Some of Bailey’s comments about “low IQ” Haitians “occupying our land” have been quoted in outlets like NPR and the Times; but those brief quotes don’t come close to conveying the full and loathsome flavor of her rhetoric, drenched in more or less overt white nationalism and racist conspiracy theories.
Here she is at the July 30 meeting:
Haitians will soon be the majority population in Springfield. Nowhere on the planet is it acceptable for another culture to create a majority population by replacing the native population. Should Israel be forced to accept a new majority population of Africans? ... Should China be forced to accept a new majority population of Brazilians? Leftists would be throwing screaming fits if this were the case. Only white populations are expected to accept and welcome foreigners of a different culture to overtake them as the majority. … Haitians are occupiers in Springfield, and taxpaying citizens have become their economic slaves.
Practically every word here is a white nationalist trope. These themes were even more overt in Bailey’s remarks at the August 13 meeting, when she shrugged off the incursion of “alleged Nazis” and accused local “leftist whites” and the NAACP of a sinister racist agenda—that is, the replacement and even “extinction” of “Springfield’s white population.”
The speaker who followed Bailey, Shannon Stanley, started out with nostalgic reminiscences about her childhood in Springfield but quickly moved on to describing the Haitians’ presence as an invasion of pests. The immigrants, she insisted, were “living their life here the way they did in Haiti: angry, stealing, polluting, living in filth, and acting like animals.”
These are the people with whom Trump and J.D. Vance have aligned themselves in Springfield.
By now, the pet-eating story has collapsed as completely as a story can collapse. The woman who made the original Facebook post about someone’s cat being eaten by Haitian neighbors has deleted and retracted it, saying it was based on garbled fourth-hand rumors. The photo of the man with the goose that appeared in the same viral X post as the Facebook screenshot was taken in Columbus, not Springfield; the man is not a migrant, and it turns out he was removing two geese that had been hit by a car. Even the Springfield resident who told the city commission that “Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off, and eating them”—a claim that was widely cited as corroborating the claim that Haitians are stealing and eating cats—has since admitted that he was simply recycling rumors he had heard.
What about the Springfield woman who called the cops about a missing cat that she thought might have been eaten by her Haitian neighbors—and whose report was cited by Vance as evidence? She found the kitty in her basement, alive, well, and uneaten. Also, it turns out that Vance had continued to amplify the pet-eating rumor even after the Springfield city manager told him the claim was baseless.
Yet the GOP presidential candidate, his running mate, and many other high-level Republicans have used it to unleash a hate-storm more blatantly and disgustingly racist than anything seen in national American politics in decades. Not only were Haitians explicitly targeted as a group: the label of Haitian migrant was readily slapped on any black person who fit the narrative, such as the Columbus man with the goose and the mentally ill cat eater in Canton.
In the end, Trumpian populism stands exposed by this story as a hateful and essentially fraudulent brand of identity politics. After Springfield and the cat memes, the GOP ticket looks ridiculous, bigoted, and mean-spirited. Vance’s insistence that he will continue calling the legal immigrants in Springfield illegal is just plain weird and vicious. But that ticket could still have the last laugh if Trump wins in November, carries out his pledge to deport those immigrants, and continues to make the Glenda Baileys of this world feel that their repugnant views represent America.
Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.
A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist, our editorial partner.
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Thanks. One useful piece of information that might talk people out of their trees is to explain how a small city/town the size of Springfield which I understand is under 60,000 peeps, needed workers, and somehow ended up with 20,000 immigrants. It reads like fiction. If you want isolationists to come to the table, they need to understand how their own town won't be next. Who decides how many people assigned refugee status are assigned to one location? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like entirely too many refugees to one location. The location's schools and cost of living, including housing, have been negatively impacted. What gives?
Would this be like the lie that Jussie Smollet was assaulted by MAGAs in the middle of the night in Chicago during an Arctic freeze, like that?