Springfield, Ohio, resident Tracy Paschke-Johannes tuned into Tuesday night’s presidential debate from her home, anxious about whether former President Donald Trump would spew the anti-immigrant rumors about Haitians living in her city that have been circulating online and on TV over the last several days.
It took Trump less than five minutes.
When answering the debate’s first question, which was about the economy, Trump mentioned Springfield during a racist tirade about immigrants “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions” who threaten to take American jobs, calling for their deportation. Later in the debate, when asked about putting more agents on the border, Trump repeated the baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are “eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats.”
“I was just stunned, going, ‘Oh, well, now everybody knows where Springfield is,’” recalled Paschke-Johannes, an ordained Lutheran minister who was immediately worried that the hateful comments would lead to harm for Haitian members of her community. “We don’t want to be known for being the place that hateful things are being said about our immigrant neighbors.”
Experts and advocates who pay close attention to the issue share Paschke-Johannes’s concerns, fearing physical harm, loss of jobs, criminalization, and negative mental health affects for Haitian and other Black immigrants across the U.S., fueled by Trump’s comments on a stage that close to 67 million people watched. Such comments and the harm that follows, they said, didn’t begin with Trump but is rooted in a long legacy in the United States of discrimination against immigrants — specifically Black immigrants and people coming from Haiti.
Among the earliest instances of anti-Haitian sentiments in the U.S. came from slaveholding states in the American south in the early 1800s, said Willie Mack, a professor at the University of Missouri who studies race and immigration. After enslaved Haitians led a rebellion in 1791 against the French and won independence, American slaveholders feared they would invade and free enslaved Africans in the U.S. In 1822, South Carolina passed a law that prohibited Black sailors from disembarking from ships that docked in the state’s ports out of fear that they would mingle with enslaved people and spread word about Haiti, perhaps sparking another rebellion.
“Haiti has always been feared within the imagination of the United States — there’s always been this fear of ‘the Black Republic,’” Mack said.
After the 1915 assassination of Haiti’s president, the United States military invaded and occupied the country, controlling its government over the span of five presidencies until power returned to the Haitian people in 1934. The U.S. ruled Haiti with a system of racial violence and colorism that mirrored discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow South, Mack said. And within the U.S., Americans were fed images of Haiti as a “voodoo and backwards, uncivilized Black country.” He said the myths about voodoo are the roots for Trump’s comments about eating cats and dogs.
On Monday, Trump’s vice presidential pick Sen. JD Vance peddled the rumor on X that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield. The city’s leaders and police officials refuted the claim, saying they did not receive any reports of pets being eaten within Springfield’s immigrant community. ABC debate co-host David Muir fact checked Trump live, but the former president doubled down on the false claim, saying he had heard it from “the people on television.”
“It’s not so much that it comes out of this particular brain of Donald Trump, as much as it is part and parcel of the narratives and stories that this country tells itself and the world of who Black people are,” said Nana Gyamfi, executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration. And throughout its history, America viewed people from Black countries, including African countries, as a “criminalized, bestial, savage, animal, neck-cutting Black person.”
“In spite of the fact that we know that, if you know Haitians personally, they ain’t nothing like that,” Gyamfi said. “They’re going to Catholic church, or maybe they’re Pentecostal, they’re eating delicious food that doesn’t have a dog or cats.” She added, “In the Haitian context, there’s that added savage vibe that is put there, that connects to the [Haitian] revolution and their politics and spirituality of Haitian people.”
As more Haitians, along with people from African countries, began to immigrate to the United States in the 1970s, these attitudes persisted. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter’s administration started the Haitian Program, which incarcerated new arrivals from Haiti in local jails and denied them permission to work, rejecting their asylum claims with the intent that they return to the political instability and violence they had fled, according to research by Carl Lindskoog, an assistant professor of history at Raritan Valley Community College who wrote a book on punishment of Haitian refugees.
Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. turned away Haitian immigrants traveling by boat, with some instances of drownings. Meanwhile, their Cuban counterparts, who typically had lighter skin, often did not face the same systemic punishment when fleeing communism, Gyamfi noted.
Although Carter’s program was overturned by the courts, Reagan used the influx of Haitian immigrants to build on the program to create a larger infrastructure of mass incarceration and immigrant detention — the early makings of today’s system, according to Lindskoog. And political leaders often peddled racist stereotypes that Haitians brought tuberculosis with them, were a public health risk, and needed to be deported. Haitian immigrants were also targeted by the Food and Drug Administration as AIDS carriers during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“What’s striking to me when I think about the comments made at the debate last night, and the last few years of anti-Haitian and xenophobia and racism, is how similar it was to the 1970s and 1980s,” Lindskoog said. “When Haitians started coming to south Florida, it was really a deep racism and xenophobia that welled up there, and it was pressure on local officials and pressure on Washington to do something to exclude them and remove them from society.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, Mack pointed to incidents of anti-Haitian police violence in New York City. In 1997, NYPD officers attacked, raped, and beat Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant working as a security guard. Then in 2000, Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian American born in New York, was shot and killed by an undercover NYPD officer during a drug operation.
“Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York City at the time, targeted them, Patrick Dorismond specifically, saying he was no altar boy and that he was looking for trouble, simply because he was Black and of Haitian descent,” Mack said.
Gyamfi also referenced a more recent incident in Del Rio, Texas, in 2021 in which Border Patrol agents riding on horseback charged at Haitians and other Black migrants. “Again that dehumanization,” she said, “being herded like cattle.”
Although the Biden administration has granted Temporary Protection Status to 300,000 Haitians already in the U.S., Gyamfi worried how Trump’s comments can further victimize Haitians and other Black immigrants.
“When I think of Ohio, I think of Mauritanians,” Gyamfi said, referring to the large numbers of immigrants from Mauritania seeking asylum and living in Ohio. “When do we start hearing about Mauritanians being attacked along with Haitians in Ohio and places all over this country where they have this influx of Mauritanian asylum-seekers, Cameroonian asylum-seekers, Congolese asylum-seekers, Angolan asylum-seekers — who as far as these ignoramuses are concerned are all going to be Haitian?”
“We’re very concerned because we know this type of dehumanization opens the door for violence against people. We know what happened during Covid,” she said, mentioning the mass shooting at Atlanta-area spas, in which a gunman killed eight people, including six people of Asian descent.
Both Gyamfi and Mack said they wanted Harris to do more to condemn Trump’s remarks and were disappointed in Harris’s lack of response on the debate stage.
“There needs to be more direct rebuke about this hatred and racism Trump is spewing,” Mack said. “He’s being more honest about it now; it’s a danger for everyone.” He added that Harris is also a child of immigrants, so Trump’s attacks on immigrants are an assault on her as well.
“That full-throated, full-chested outrage around abortion?” Gyamfi said, “That’s what we should have heard. That should be something that stops her in her tracks, and you draw the line and say ‘No.’”
In Springfield, Paschke-Johannes said that although Haitian immigrants had started arriving in the city in 2020, hate against Haitians didn’t bubble up there until August 2023, when a car driven by a Haitian man without a valid driver’s license got into an accident with a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. Some in the community used the incident to blame its Haitian population for other issues, such as shortage of housing and schooling opportunities. On Wednesday, the boy’s father blasted Trump and Vance for using his son’s death as a political prop.
“You’re looking at a very vulnerable population of people that have moved to a new area, and immigrant populations are already at risk for exploitation and being taken advantage of,” Paschke-Johannes said, evoking the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. “So to target or speak about any particular population and any particular city is concerning, and we are certainly concerned that our neighbors remain safe.”
As the right-wing rumors exploded online in recent days, Paschke-Johannes took to her Facebook account to paint a different picture, writing a post that was widely shared online: “Just here to report our immigrant friends have brought some new restaurants, are filling jobs and helping the local economy, & playing soccer with their kids. No encampments. No ‘missing pets’ being consumed. Just a beautiful, slightly mundane Midwest town doing its thing — carry on.”