“This was a false claim. I couldn’t believe that such a high official could make such a claim,” Salomon said.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance,
Elon Musk and prominent Ohio
Republicans had already spread the false rumors, lying about how Haitian immigrants had been killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, a blue-collar town of 60,000 people in western Ohio. But the rumors, leaving Salomon and other Haitians in fear of being targeted for violence and discrimination, didn’t start with them.
They were initially
spread online in August on social platforms used by far-right extremists and by Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group.
Springfield officials and police say they have received no credible reports of pets being harmed by members of the immigrant community, instead suggesting the story may have originated in Canton, Ohio,
where an American woman with no known connection to Haiti was arrested in August for allegedly stomping a cat to death and eating the animal.
But that hasn’t prevented Republican party politicians from scapegoating Springfield’s 15,000 Haitian immigrants as Trump and others attempt to propel immigration to the center of their fall political campaigns. In addition to Tuesday’s debate, Trump held a news conference Friday in which he rambled without evidence about how Haitians had descended on Springfield “and destroyed the place”.
When Haitian immigrants began trickling into Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories in 2017, some thought the new residents could help the city regain its former vigor as a once-thriving manufacturing hub. Once home to major agricultural machinery companies in the mid-20th century, Springfield has lost a quarter of its population since the 1960s.
“They came to us for one reason: they were looking for ways to find out how to work,” Casey Rollins, executive director of the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Springfield chapter, said of those who came to the Ohio city from Haiti.
“So we got together immigration lawyers and interpreters to figure out how to help them work. We are getting them online and getting them to apply [for work permits]. We wanted workers here [in Springfield] – they want to work.”