‘The white-hot laser of hate’ is trained on Springfield, Ohio. How long will it last?

Luke Ramseth | (TNS) The Detroit News

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Two weeks had passed since Donald Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants in this city were “eating the pets,” and restaurant owner Ketlie Moise was starting to worry.

One of Springfield’s Haitian restaurants, Rose Goute Creole, has often been packed with supporters since Trump’s false comments on the debate stage Sept. 10. But at Moise’s diner, Kékét Bongou, which brands itself more broadly as Caribbean food, business has slowed.

Many of her usual Haitian customers walked to the restaurant before because they don’t have cars, but now they are hesitant to go out in public. She has safety concerns, too, and often closes hours early.

“If it’s going to continue for a long time, we have to leave this place,” said Moise, 48, who hails from Gonaïves, Haiti, and came to Springfield about five years ago. She worked at a local gasket manufacturer, and for Amazon, saving up enough to start the restaurant six months ago.

Springfield, northeast of Dayton, has been at the center of America’s increasingly bizarre, meme-filled immigration discourse ever since Trump, the Republican nominee for president, said dogs and cats were being eaten by immigrants there — and since those claims were repeated by J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate. There have been bomb threats, school closures, canceled festivals and a visit from a group claiming to be the Proud Boys, prompting local officials and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who is from the area, to call for a stop to the campaign rhetoric.

But it has shown no sign of slowing in an already tumultuous race for the White House. And Trump says he may visit soon — making Springfield the de facto battleground over race and immigration in this year’s presidential campaign and its people bystanders in a controversy they generally did not seek nor want.

The city’s Haitian population has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now estimated at 12,000 to 15,000. Many of the Haitian migrants are legally in the United States under a federal program known as Temporary Protected Status, after fleeing political instability and gang violence at home.

They have helped fill much-needed roles in the region’s resurgent manufacturing and warehousing economy. But their arrival also stressed education, housing, healthcare, and emergency response resources in the city of about 60,000, local leaders have said.

Local tensions boiled over in August 2023 when a school bus crash involving a Haitian driver killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark. Then came the surge of national attention in recent days over the false Haitian pet-eating claims.

“I think we’re going to stay in the spotlight for awhile,” said Rob Baker, a political science professor at Springfield’s Wittenberg University, where students were just settling back into the classroom after bomb threats sent them home last month. “I call it the white-hot laser of hate, really. I think it’s trained on us right now, and there’s an advantage to them of keeping it elevated as an issue. So I don’t see it going away until the election, maybe not even then.”

Last week, the former Republican presidential candidate and Ohio resident Vivek Ramaswamy was here, hosting a town hall where he argued mass deportations are needed in the United States. And Trump himself said at a recent rally he plans to visit — suggesting he might not make it out alive — despite local leaders raising concerns about resources that are already spread thin.

‘We are looking for work’

Plenty of Michigan towns would recognize the story of Springfield: manufacturing jobs leave, residents depart, median incomes plummet.

Signs of those tough times can still be found in the Champion City, from tilting, boarded-up homes to potholed roads on the outskirts. But a comeback is well underway. The tidy downtown offers restaurants, a couple breweries, artist studios, murals, and redone streets and sidewalks. Manufacturers and other employers have been returning to surrounding Clark County. The local economic development agency notes 7,000 new jobs have been created over the last several years, and that Haitian immigrants have helped fill many of them.

Baker said the challenges are real. He was one of the founding board members of the Rocking Horse Community Health Center, where many Haitians seek care, and it has seen its patient translation service costs, for Haitian Creole, triple in less than a year.

“It’s stressing that facility,” the professor said. “It’s stressing the schools, with all the young kids who are coming in who don’t speak English. It’s straining the city’s infrastructure in terms of police and public safety responses. The call numbers have jumped up. A lot of the Haitians are driving, and they’re not used to driving in our country, and so they’ve had some accidents.”

But by the same token, Baker said they have taken jobs that needed to be filled, and they have started local businesses, including restaurants. As the teacher of an urban politics class, he knows urban areas in this country were historically created by immigrants.

DeWine, in a recent editorial in the New York Times, said he recently met with local manufacturing business owners who employ Haitians. “As one of them told me, his business would not have been able to stay open after the pandemic but for the Haitians who filled the jobs,” the Republican governor wrote. He pledged the state will help fund additional healthcare and law enforcement resources for the community.

Franky Pierre was hanging out at Moise’s restaurant on a recent Monday afternoon and joined in a conversation about what had brought so many Haitians to the Springfield area. The 47-year-old, whose wife and two children remain stuck in Port-au-Prince, said it was nothing more than the promise of good jobs. A Springfield staffing agency, First Diversity, had also helped many Haitians arrive from Florida, he added.

“If there’s any state, they have a job right now, the same thing will happen again,” Pierre said. “We are looking for work. Anywhere there’s work, you’re gonna see us.”

Pierre has watched the YouTube videos and TikToks in recent days, sometimes for hours, making various claims about Springfield’s Haitian community, like how they seem threatening, or are screwing up the local Walmart. He knows some view his immigrant community in a negative light.

“But hey, come on,” Pierre said, noting several Haitian businesses had opened in the surrounding strip mall. “We come here, we work, we pay taxes, we build businesses. We buy things from Walmart. Walmart make more money, the gas station make more money, dealership make more money. Everybody. They don’t see it like that, though.”

‘Get them fired up’

Despite local authorities saying there’s no evidence of immigrants eating pets — or geese from a local park — various gawkers and influencers descended on Springfield anyway after Trump’s debate remarks.

Two weeks later, visitors ranging from a YouTuber to a reporter from an Austrian newspaper were still poking around, looking for folks to interview.

The visitors haven’t found much. A Wall Street Journal reporter followed up on a police report filed by a resident who said her pet might’ve been taken by Haitians; it turned out the cat had been found safe in her own basement. NBC News interviewed a different woman who was among the first to post about the pet-eating rumor online; she clarified she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident.

A journalist with a right-wing Canadian outlet, Rebel News, combed the city for evidence and acknowledged after three days he’d struggled to find hard pet-eating evidence: “One would think, if one’s pet were killed or mutilated, you would make a record of that,” said the reporter, David Menzies.

Even Ramaswamy, who wasn’t shy about raising conspiracy theories during his presidential bid — like how the January 2021 Capitol riot was an “inside job” — steered around the pet-eating issue during his Springfield town hall, which was attended by more than 300.

Yet Baker said it might still be an effective campaign trail talking point for Trump and Vance, as they seek to drive home their hardline stances on immigration. It is the type of claim that will certainly stay front and center in voters minds, he said, even though it’s untrue.

“It’s going to be a race that comes down to which side can get their people out, because it’s so close, right?” the professor said. “So if you can irritate them, get them motivated, get them fired up, then that is something that is advantageous to their side.”

‘Bad and good with everybody’

Springfield native Michael Gilbert, 64, was fishing on a recent Tuesday afternoon at Snyder Park’s whitewater park, not far from where people had claimed Haitians were taking waterfowl. His puppy, Sissy, was jumping around on the rocks beside him.

The pet-eating claims are “crazy,” Gilbert said, and he would know.

“I mean, I’m in the neighborhood with them,” he said. “They’re all around me. Ain’t nobody’s dog or cat missing. You would’ve heard a whole bunch of (stuff) by now. There would be riots — ‘You ate my dog! You ate my cat!’”

Gilbert, who supports Vice President Kamala Harris, said he knows plenty of Haitians. Sometimes they come to him for help with car repairs. Mostly, he said, they keep to themselves. There have been driving problems, he confirmed, but they’ve also bought houses and started stores. “Overall,” he said, “they just trying to live.”

Across town, Vickie Travis, 64, was relaxing on her front porch. Her cat, Brodie, hovered nearby. A Trump sign was stuck in her front lawn, but Travis, who is blind, said she’s actually undecided; her adult son had put the sign there. She’s still pondering the candidates’ policies on abortion, taxes, and rising food prices.

As for the sudden national attention on her hometown, Travis wasn’t sure what to think. She can’t rule out that Haitians ate pets, but she hasn’t heard any first-hand stories.

She said it’s important newcomers follow the “rules of America,” she said, including for driving, but she hasn’t encountered any issues with the Haitians personally. She doesn’t believe they should be kicked out of the country; it wouldn’t be fair, since the decision was already made to let them in.

“There’s bad and good with everybody, even with us,” Travis said, noting Springfield was a rough town with shootings and robberies long before the Haitians arrived. “On this street, everything seems cool. I hear people go by and they speak another language. I imagine that’s them. I don’t really understand it. But they’ve never bothered me. I walk down to the stores and stuff, they never bothered me.”

Travis was fascinated to hear that there was a Haitian restaurant, Rose Goute Creole, just a couple blocks away from her home. She asked for the exact location.

“I’ll check out the food,” she said. “It don’t matter to me, I’ll try everything, almost.”

Family in Haiti

Moise, who has a background running and working in restaurants in both Haiti and Turks and Caicos, didn’t have any local connections when she came to the Springfield area several years ago, looking to escape the violence that had killed her mother.