A week after his unsubstantiated comments on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, sparked a national firestorm and spurred violent threats in the small town, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) doubled down on his baseless claims that Haitians are eating their neighbors\u2019 pets \u201cto draw attention to the Biden-Harris immigration policies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ohio\u2019s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, rejected Vance\u2019s claims, calling the storyline \u201ca piece of garbage that was simply not true.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a contentious interview with CNN\u2019s Dana Bash on Sunday morning, Vance said that if he has to \u201ccreate stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s running mate has repeatedly claimed that the media was not paying attention to problems in Springfield until he spread the false rumor and his allies started making racist memes about Haitians eating pets in the small town. But the New York Times published an in-depth piece on Springfield days before Vance raised his baseless allegations in a social media post that said people \u201chave had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn\u2019t be in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump repeated the claims Tuesday during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, even as the latest allegations about Springfield have been debunked at the local and state level, spurred violent threats against local Haitians \u2014 who are in the United States legally \u2014 and led to bomb threats that temporarily closed City Hall and schools. But despite those fact checks from local officials, Vance stuck to his claims and said he was simply passing along the concerns of his constituents.<\/p>\n
But when Bash noted that Vance \u201cjust said you\u2019re creating this story,\u201d the senator quickly attempted to clarify his position.<\/p>\n
\u201cI say that we\u2019re creating a story, meaning we\u2019re creating the American media focusing on it,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris\u2019s policies. Her policies did that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris is not directly responsible for Haitian immigration to Springfield. They arrived after being admitted to the United States legally under a program that grants them temporary protected status due to the violence and chaos in their home country.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut yes,\u201d Vance continued, \u201cwe created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris\u2019s policies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, the mayor of Springfield said that a bomb threat Thursday that led to the evacuation of City Hall and other buildings \u201cused hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.\u201d More bomb threats and evacuations followed on Friday.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, when reporters asked Trump about them, he said he didn\u2019t know what had happened with the bomb threats, but he asserted that the city was being \u201ctaken over\u201d by migrants, even though most of the Haitians are here on legal visas. \u201cSpringfield was this beautiful town, and now they\u2019re going through hell. It\u2019s a sad thing. Not going to happen with me,\u201d Trump told reporters.<\/p>\n
If elected, Trump said Friday, he would effect \u201clarge deportations in Springfield. We\u2019re going to get these people out,\u201d and then indicated he would send Haitians to Venezuela. He baselessly inflated the number of migrants living there and accused them of destroying the town.<\/p>\n
When Bash asked Vance on Sunday about the threats to Springfield, he countered that the CNN anchor \u201cjust accused me of inciting violence against the community when all that I\u2019ve done is surface the complaints of my constituents, people who are suffering because of Kamala Harris\u2019s policies. Are we not allowed to talk about these problems because some psychopaths are threatening violence? We can condemn the violence on the one hand, but also talk about the terrible consequences of Kamala Harris\u2019s open border, on the other hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s comments lie in sharp contrast to those made by DeWine, a fellow Republican who said Sunday that \u201cthe Haitians who are in Springfield are legal\u201d and that \u201cthey came to Springfield to work,\u201d praising their arrival as aiding \u201ca great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in.\u201d<\/p>\n
DeWine said the companies have said \u201cthey are very good workers. They\u2019re very happy to have them there. And frankly, that\u2019s helped the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The governor allowed that the influx of an estimated 15,000 Haitians to a town of 58,000 created strains on municipal services that require more federal assistance. \u201cNow, are there problems connected? Well, sure,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re addressing those. We\u2019re working on those every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n
But DeWine also decried the threats that have come to Springfield since Vance and Trump zeroed in on the town as a campaign talking point, including white nationalist groups hoping to capitalize on racial animus. \u201cThere are hate groups coming into Springfield,\u201d DeWine said. \u201cWe don\u2019t need these hate groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as much as DeWine condemned the false claims about Haitians in Springfield, he stopped short of criticizing Trump and Vance for spreading those claims, saying that the problems on the border are \u201clegitimate\u201d and ones where \u201cthe vast majority\u201d of the American people \u201cagree with Donald Trump.\u201d But, he concluded, \u201cwhat\u2019s going on in Springfield is just fundamentally different. These people are here legally. They came to work. They are looking for good people. These are hardworking people.\u201d<\/p>\n
A representative for Vance had no immediate comment about DeWine\u2019s rejection of the claims.<\/p>\n
Late last week, the woman who penned a Facebook post claiming she had heard about Haitians eating pets said she had no direct knowledge of such an incident and regrets her role in spreading rumors about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just exploded into something I didn\u2019t mean to happen,\u201d Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday. Lee\u2019s original post claimed a neighbor\u2019s cat had gone missing and that the neighbor believed the cat had been attacked by her Haitian neighbors.<\/p>\n
But media and fact-checking watchdog NewsGuard interviewed both Lee and her neighbor, Kimberly Newton, and found that Lee had misstated her friend\u2019s original story in her Facebook post, which she has since deleted.<\/p>\n
Newton, who was not interviewed by NBC, said she heard about the purported attack from a third party, and had not witnessed it directly, NewsGuard reported.<\/p>\n
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said Sunday that Vance \u201cshould know better\u201d than continuing to spread baseless claims. He said there is a \u201ccausal connection\u201d between Vance\u2019s spreading of the rumors and \u201cthe safety and security of the American people\u201d \u2014 referencing the bomb threats in Springfield that came after Trump repeated the false allegations on the debate stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just doesn\u2019t understand the power of his words, the power of his lies,\u201d Shapiro said on CNN. \u201cThose lies are putting people at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday, President Joe Biden demanded that the attacks on the Haitian community in Springfield stop. \u201cI want to take a moment to say something [about the] Haitian American community that\u2019s under attack in our country right now,\u201d Biden said during a White House event celebrating Black excellence. \u201cIt\u2019s simply wrong. There\u2019s no place in America. This has to stop, what he\u2019s doing. It has to stop!\u201d<\/p>\n
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A week after his unsubstantiated comments on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, sparked a national firestorm and spurred violent threats in the small town, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) doubled down on his baseless claims that Haitians are eating their neighbors\u2019 pets \u201cto draw attention to the Biden-Harris immigration policies.\u201d Ohio\u2019s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, rejected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}