Springfield native John Legend irked residents of his Ohio hometown by urging them to embrace the Haitian immigrant community amid unverified claims that they’re abducting and eating people’s pets.
“You may have heard of Springfield, Ohio this week,” the EGOT winner said in a clip shared to Instagram. “In fact, if you watched the debate, we were discussed by our presidential candidates, including a very special, interesting man named Donald J. Trump.”
The former president cast a bright spotlight on Springfield Tuesday when he amplified an internet conspiracy theory during his first and likely only faceoff against Vice President Kamala Harris.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
When confronted by moderators, who told him no such thing had been confirmed, Trump doubled down, telling them he’d seen it on TV.
While city officials have vehemently denied Trump’s claim in the days that followed, the conspiracy theory continues to gain traction online, which prompted Legend to speak out on the matter.
“Nobody’s eating cats,” the EGOT winner said. “Nobody’s eating dogs. We all just want to live and flourish and raise our families in a healthy and safe environment.”
Legend also spent a good portion of the video discussing how Springfield has changed in recent years, citing an increase of jobs in the city since President Biden took the White House.
“Now, our city had been shrinking for decades,” Legend explained. “We didn’t have enough jobs. We didn’t have enough opportunity so people left and went somewhere else.”
Under the Biden Administration, however, “there have been more jobs that opened up, more manufacturing jobs, more plants, factories that needed employees and were ready to hire people,” he continued. “So we got a lot of job opportunities, and we didn’t have enough people in our town of 60,000 people to fill those jobs.”
Around the same time, Haitians were facing turmoil and upheaval, so “the federal government granted visas and immigration status to a certain number of Haitian immigrants so they could come to our country legally,” Legend said.
The result was some 15,000 immigrants entering the Springfield community.
While acknowledging such a swell in population comes with many challenges — like “new language, new culture, new dietary preferences” — Legend compared the arriving immigrants to “your German ancestors, your Irish ancestors, your Italian ancestors, your Jewish ancestors, your Jamaican ancestors, your Polish ancestors.” He dubbed it the “American Dream” and urged residents to “have the same kind of grace that we would want our ancestors to have.”
According to TMZ, those in Springfield were less than thrilled with Legend’s social media message. They declared him out of touch, pointing out that he now lives hundreds of miles away in Beverly Hills.