Community Groups in Ohio Fight Anti-Haitian Violence Stoked by Trump and Vance

“You can see it’s pure hatred. They hate us,” Jims Denis, a Haitian American who moved to Springfield, Ohio, five years ago, told the Columbus Dispatch. “I take my kids to the park usually; I cannot do that anymore. You know, I have to just stay home and just don’t go out. We used to just go for a walk in the neighborhood, but we cannot do that anymore.”

The public, racist attacks on Haitians immigrants in Springfield, an hour from where I live in Columbus, are not just about rhetoric. What gets said in Republican campaign speeches, media talk shows and social media diatribes has had an impact on day-to-day life.

The anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism targeting this community is being deliberately stoked by GOP presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, a U.S. Senator from Ohio. Trump’s nasty lies about Haitian immigrants in his September 10 debate with Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris gave a national stage to the fabrications previously circulated by Vance: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” These lies have been disproven, but the campaign has continued spreading them as Vance prepares for his own debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate.

Adam Banks, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Springfield, talked to me about the impact of these words: “Since the debate there have been disruptions in the everyday lives of all people in Springfield, Haitian and otherwise. Bomb threats have been cast toward institutions that all of our children and families need: schools, hospitals, grocery stores and City Hall. Though deemed bogus by authorities, these threats have had and will continue to have devastating effects on the mental health of everyone in Springfield, especially our children.”

Reverend Banks noted that the attacks on Haitians have expanded at times into a general anti-Black violence: “Haitian and non-Haitian Black folx have been targets of violence from drive-by shootings to physical, interpersonal attacks.”

A host of Ohio politicians have followed the lead of Trump and Vance. Even as Springfield schools were closed on September 12 due to bomb threats with xenophobic messages, reliably racist Attorney General David Yost fanned the flames by giving more credibility to “a recorded police call from a witness who saw immigrants capturing geese for food in Springfield” than to Springfield officials who debunked the conspiracy. Businessman and Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who has been endorsed by Vance, called for stripping documented Haitians of their papers and deporting them.

Trump, Vance and the MAGA crowd are not simply being eccentric or outlandish. Following a long-established pattern in U.S. history toward immigrants, who have been scapegoated in these ways again and again, the GOP is trying to build popular support for their anti-immigrant policies by demonizing immigrants of color as out to disrupt and destroy their white neighbors’ lives.

The Dayton Daily News reported on September 16 that the aftermath of the debate has deepened fears of racial strife in a Haitian community that numbers 15,000 in “a mostly white, blue-collar city of about 59,000.”

Many Haitians have come to Springfield since 2021, under the federal government’s Temporary Protected Status program (TPS), given the rise of gang violence and political crisis in Haiti, followed by a major earthquake.

In The Haitian Times, writer Macollvie J. Neel described how failed economic policies, poor social services, and racial prejudice laid the groundwork for conditions that Trump and Vance could manipulate with their base racism. A “relatively small, dying town” got on the map again because of the influx of Haitian labor and small businesses, but there was “a failure of government to proactively plan for the immigrants’ impact at the state, county and municipality levels – leaving local officials ill-equipped to absorb the influx.”

“Since the debate there have been disruptions in the everyday lives of all people in Springfield, Haitian and otherwise. Bomb threats have been cast toward institutions that all of our children and families need.”

Neel explains that Springfield is an example of a long-standing racial problem in the U.S.: “Since its founding, both forced and voluntary migration – indentured servitude, chattel slavery, continuous immigration – Black and Brown hands have built this country,” but have always been marked as outsiders. Republicans have used the American reliance on those hands, along with demographic changes, to fuel “distorted white replacement theories” and the current hatred on display in Ohio.

Reverend Banks described what this meant on the ground well before Trump and Vance latched onto Springfield as their rallying cry. The presence of Haitians “has been met with micro- and macro-aggression,” Banks told Truthout. “‘Staring’ and ‘noise’ have been reasons for white residents to call law enforcement to remove Haitians from grocery stores, eerily echoing racially coded indictments on Black and Brown folx who transgress social and geographical boundaries.”

Landlords took advantage of housing demands: “Haitian members of the community have faced exploitation when renting, several groups living at the same address, all paying exorbitant amounts in monthly fees.” All were then affected by skyrocketing houses prices. Long lines at offices and hospitals, as well as language barriers in schools — all exacerbated tensions, Reverend Banks said.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Viles Dorsainvil, president of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, gave a further context for the rise of anti-Haitian hatred in this moment: misdirected anger after COVID-19 social assistance was taken away from a working class that badly needed it.

“In 2020,” Dorsainvil said, “many Americans were given free social assistance, whether cash assistance or food assistance…. But in 2023 and 2024, Americans had to re-enroll in programs, and they were no longer free. Now they believe that the government took the money from them to give to the Haitians. This is where the tension started to rise against the Haitians, with people saying that the government gave Haitians cash, which was a false claim … instead of looking for the truth, they just put it in their minds that those benefits that were taken from them were going to us Haitians. And they started to hate us.”

These tensions came to a head in August 2023 when a child was killed in a school bus accident involving a Haitian driver. The tragic incident, Reverend Banks describes, “led to packed out City Commission Meetings where predominantly White crowds spewed hateful, xenophobic speech about Haitian members of the community.” The driver was wrongfully used to attack the entire Haitian community. In this context, Banks said, “white supremacists (though small in number) held several demonstrations in downtown Springfield.”

These were the conditions in which the false stories about pets took hold.

Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck and other officials have spent the weeks since the presidential debate debunking the hateful lies spread by Vance and Trump. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, though still endorsing Donald Trump for president, called the rumors about Haitians, “garbage,” and denounced a Ku Klux Klan flier in Springfield whipping up anger against Haitians.

DeWine’s comments, followed up by a New York Times editorial in which he defended Haitian migrants to Springfield, are important in reducing the temperature in this moment. Historically, in many such instances of anti-immigrant hatred and violence — from the 1907 Bellingham, Washington riots against South Asians to 2023 anti-immigrant protests in Staten Island — when officials openly support the racists and fascists, life for immigrants becomes even harder.

And yet, part of DeWine’s argument is that focusing on documented immigrants like the Ohio Haitians will “dilute and cloud” the GOP’s “winning argument about the [southern] border.” This attempt to demonize undocumented immigrants of color while defending those with papers shows ignorance of how anti-immigrant scapegoating works.

Trump’s and Vance’s dog whistles to their far right goons have incited their audience. Between September 13 and 16, bomb threats, often accompanied by racist language, led to the shutting down of schools, medical centers, colleges, offices, and other facilities. While no bombs were discovered, over 30 threats and a long list of lockdowns have rattled the city, which is often the intent of bomb threats. (A spokesperson for DeWine has claimed that “the vast majority of the bomb threats came from foreign countries,” though he declined to offer specifics and did not provide any evidence.) The media contact for Clark State College in Springfield told me the college decided to go virtual from September 16-20, giving a sense of the fear and uncertainty.

In that context, the Haitian Times and the Haitian Community Help and Support Center decided to cancel a planned public community meeting they had organized on Saturday evening, September 13, opting for a smaller, more private online conversation instead. As The Haitian Times reported: “Originally planned as an in-person community town hall, the meeting, part of an ongoing series organized by The Haitian Times, was moved to Zoom after the city received bomb threats tied to white extremists.”

“Haitian and non-Haitian Black folx have been targets of violence from drive-by shootings to physical, interpersonal attacks.”

The Haitian community in Springfield is quite organized, with several groups emerging over the past few years. Besides the Haitian Community Health and Support Center there are also groups like the Haitian Community Alliance, which actively supports and provides a platform for the local Haitian community.

Jacob Payen, a spokesperson for the Haitian Community Alliance told me that the group “put together all local Haitian institutions such as businesses, churches and organizations. Our mission is to empower the Haitian community by joining our voices together. We have programs like English as a second Language (ESOL), drivers’ education, homeless and veteran assistance, youth program. We’re working to strengthen other Haitian institutions so we can have a harmonized community and city.”

Among the many groups supporting Haitians are the Springfield branch of St. Vincent de Paul, which helps with basic needs and information; the Rocking Horse Community Health Center, which provides health care to all regardless of income; and First Baptist Church’s Cultural Connection Fund, which, Reverend Banks told me, aims at “enhancing cultural appreciation and promoting reconciliation within our community.”

Since the antagonism against Haitians did not start a few weeks ago with Trump and Vance, as several Springfield- and Columbus-based Haitian and non-Haitian residents emphasized to me, Springfield was already involved in doing the work of building bridges across divisions. A colleague at Wittenberg University, located in Springfield, shared meeting notes from a coalition meeting downtown just after the debate. As one might expect, the Haitian Community Health and Support Center and the Haitian Community Alliance were there, as well as groups like ABLE (Advocates for Basic Legal Equality), which offers free legal support for Haitian community members and others. But the meeting also included Springfield city officials and a representative from the office of the governor.

It is heartening to see that local groups and coalitions outside Springfield have immediately offered their support. Prominent among these is the Haitian Community Network of Columbus (HACONET). Members of that group visited Springfield the weekend after Trump’s attack to spend time with people there and support the community. On September 24, Marc FeQuiere, executive director of HACONET, participated in a Columbus City Council public hearing to establish a commission on immigrants and refugee affairs.

The Columbus City commission on immigrants and refugee affairs has been a long time in the making, following a yearlong study by the City Council and Ohio State College of Social Work faculty showing the need to better support immigrants to Columbus – including Haitians. Immigrants, in fact, have accounted for over half of the population growth in Columbus, which is Ohio’s fastest growing metro area, from 2020-2023. But while Haitians were not the only focus of the commission, Columbus City Councilmember Lourdes Barroso de Padilla directly connected the current political attack on Haitians with the need for building stronger unity and support networks for immigrants.

“The strength lies in us being together as a unified community,” the councilmember said at the public hearing. “Because today it’s Haiti, and tomorrow it’s another country. It is a narrative that … isn’t fair and it creates chaos and it creates uncertainty and it creates an unsafe environment for entire communities, cities and countries. And certainly, here in the city of Columbus, we will not stand for it.”

Solidarity has been everywhere. On September 22, for instance, at a rally in nearby Dayton, Ohio, Xavier Johnson, the Pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, told the crowd that rejecting harmful anti-immigrant discourse “begins with actions like this — with us showing up and saying, you know what, that’s not who we are. This is not what we do. It is unacceptable, and we reject it.”

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance, which is active in supporting Haitians, has set up a new page, One Love Ohio, to collect solidarity messages and reporting — including a message from Springfield native and celebrity John Legend.

As we know from past experiences, the struggle will have ups and downs. The same period that is inspiring solidarity is also galvanizing the far right. Trump proclaims he will push for “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” starting with Springfield – and the GOP and far right is continuing to scapegoat Haitians. Thankfully, Trump canceled plans to visit Springfield, and a so-called “Pissed Off Americans March” planned for September 28 fizzled out. Some members of the openly neo-Nazi Blood Tribe did march, apparently arriving there after trying to disrupt PrideFest in Grove City, but it seems they were largely ignored.

There is a strong basis for unity, but our work is cut out for us.

A Bipartisan Project

We are justifiably outraged by the open racism being expressed by Trump and Vance. But the current conditions of Haitians in the U.S., and attitudes toward them, have been the result of a long bipartisan project.

As Haitian American writer Roxane Gay put it in “The Haitian Question”: “The history of Haitian immigration to the United States is that of politicians and administrations on both sides of the aisle fighting to keep Haitians out of the country, with equal cruelty. Only the names change.”

In 2021, photographer Paul Ratje circulated dramatic and shocking photos showing U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback trapping Haitians trying to cross the Rio Grande. The Biden administration itself had to admit the images were “horrific.” And yet, Jake Johnston, Haiti specialist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote at that time, “under the Biden administration there has been no sign of significant change in policy toward Haiti. Though the Biden administration did grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian migrants this spring, in its first few months in office, the new administration deported more Haitians than the Trump administration did in the entirety of fiscal year 2020.”

Ratje’s photographs painfully remind us that the targeting of Haitians at the border draws from long U.S. histories of anti-immigrant policing, anti-Black slave patrols, and anti-Native settler violence.

As with many immigrant groups, struggles around immigration policy for Haitians are extensions of U.S. intervention in their own countries. The demonization of Haitians by the U.S. ruling class goes back centuries, to the Haitian Revolution from 1791-1804.

Reverend Johnson who addressed the rally in Dayton on September 15 knows this history. He wore a shirt that read “Haiti: Freedom began with us” – noting that Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery.

The Haitian Revolution drove out the French colonizers and enslavers in 1804 – not long after the U.S. and the French declared themselves free of monarchical rule. But, as Ayendy Bonifacio, a scholar at the University of Toledo, writes: “Instead of celebrating Haiti’s historic uprising, the U.S. media painted it as a dangerous contagion spreading from the Caribbean, threatening to infect the United States with notions of Black rebellion and social upheaval.”

The U.S. and French “democracies” fiercely opposed the Haitian Revolution, with the U.S. particularly concerned about its influence on free and enslaved Black people. As historian Leslie Alexander documented in Fear of a Black Republic, they were right to worry: Haiti became a constant inspiration and presence in Black revolutionary and internationalist thought.

Once Haiti became a Republic, the U.S. and France did all they could to break the new nation. Thomas Jefferson isolated the country diplomatically while France forced Haiti, at gunpoint, to pay a huge sum as reparations for the loss of French property to preserve its independence. The resulting debt crisis has contributed to Haiti being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It took Haiti 122 years to pay off the loans, taking 80 percent of its revenue during this time period.

It is these conditions of global inequality that lead migrants to uproot their lives to travel to wealthy countries – in other words, the countries enriched by slavery, colonialism and settler colonialism. Many immigrant rights protesters, reversing the racist logic that immigrants should “go home,” reference this when they repeat a slogan often chanted at demonstrations: “We are here because you were there.”

Understanding imperialism and border policies together, we can outline some key moments in the U.S. relation to Haiti over the years, including: the direct occupation of Haiti by the U.S. (1915-1934); its full support for the brutal dictatorships of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957-71) and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1971-1986); its restrictions on Haitians fleeing these dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, including holding thousands at Guantanamo Bay; the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1994, after the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, resulting in thousands of Haitians being deported; and the U.S. invasion in 2004 after a coup against Aristide, which he claimed was orchestrated by the U.S.

And so, the U.S. is not only directly involved in Haitian affairs, but has kept out and criminalized those who have sought to leave. As Gay reminds us: “As Haitians tried to escape the tyranny of the Duvalier dynasty, an autocratic dictatorship, then-President Jimmy Carter, perhaps one of the most beloved U.S. Presidents, instituted the Haitian Program. Haitian migrants were put in jails, denied work visas, and denied asylum claims.”

Given the long history of white supremacy and imperialist arrogance in the U.S., even anti-interventionist positions by politicians have been driven by calculation of U.S. interests, not anti-imperialist values.

For example, while arguing against Bill Clinton’s planned invasion of Haiti in 1994 and advocating a focus on Bosnia instead, a Democratic Senator on the Foreign Affairs Committee named Joseph R. Biden said: “If Haiti — a God-awful thing to say — if Haiti just quietly sank into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”

Not too far from Trump’s insulting reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018.

With the assassination of the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, a deadly earthquake in August, and spiraling gang violence, Biden opened the door to Haitian refugees and asylum seekers to come to Springfield through the TPS program.

But in this same period, as mentioned above, Biden’s border policies led to thousands of Haitians being sent back, having been refused asylum. It is in this context that the Border Patrol scenes on horseback emerged and went viral.

The U.S. continues to play a role in the bloodshed in Haiti, both in terms of gang activity and political violence. Haiti has no gun manufacturing factories, and the armed clashes are maintained by the flow of weapons being trafficked from the United States.

“You Belong Here”

On September 13, the artist Janel Young unveiled a new mural in Springfield called “You Belong Here.” A collaboration between the Springfield Public Art, Westcott House and Springfield City School District, the mural — a year-long-project — was designed for a specific purpose: to be “vibrant, eye-catching, and inviting for youth, family, and residents, reflecting the shift in Springfield’s culture and community.” Community groups were involved in the project from the beginning, and identified one of the goals as remembering the past while also its “growing cultural diversity while looking to the future.”

In a Facebook post about the new mural, Westcott House noted: “While America was waking up to confusing news about Springfield, Ohio, we were preparing to celebrate the factual goodness that is palpable in our community these days.”

Revered Banks told me that since “the challenges that Springfield faces have existed before the current national spotlight,” many different groups have been working together, multireligious and multiethnic, to create “long-term, sustainable solutions.” The religious community has pledged to create spaces for building relationships and allowing necessary “cultural education” to take place: “Several churches, English and Haitian Creole speaking, are strategizing how to bring different people together in order to build bridges.”

These words resonate for me, both as a second-generation Desi with strong ties to Brown immigrant communities, and as someone who moved to central Ohio 20 years ago from the East Coast. I recognize the necessity to always build bridges and unite, as well as the warmth in the people I see around me every day — the hopeful confidence and the willingness to do the work.

Trump and Vance — with a completely cynical attitude toward questions of truth — appear desperate to undermine all such efforts being made in Springfield to bridge the gaps between people. They are preying on people’s real questions about social services in Springfield, trying to turn white anger against their Haitian neighbors.

In terms of material support, DeWine has taken an important step, earmarking $2.5 million over two years to provide more primary health care for migrants and ease the pressure on the system. His gestures, like visiting a Springfield Haitian restaurant on September 22, have been appreciated by the community. But he has also sent an influx of troopers to Springfield, allegedly to protect schools and help with traffic — although history has shown us that more police does not equal more safety.

Support for services that meet the needs of the people are crucial while we struggle, together, against hateful and divisive rhetoric that does absolutely nothing for anyone.

The incredible capacity of Springfield’s people for solidarity and empathy is demonstrated in the statement of Nathan Clark, the father of the child slain in the August 2023 bus accident mentioned above. Forcefully pushing back against Trump and other politicians for using the name of his son, Clark gives a glimpse of the heart many in Ohio have to pull together.

In the end, this heart and commitment to unity is what gets us past the abyss. As Neel writes in The Haitian Times, “It’s the actions of regular Black, brown and white residents coming together to stand with the Haitians that will have the biggest impact. Actions such as invitations to join church services and to patronize Haitian businesses seen around town all weekend.”

Because Haitians belong here — not only as guests who are “tolerated” but as a core part of our communities.

Author’s Note: I am grateful for the Haitian Americans in Springfield and Columbus who talked to me, both on and off the record, and the Columbus activists who have kept sharing articles and information as we continue to build solidarity with Haitians in Springfield and defend immigrant rights everywhere.