A week ago, the city of Springfield, Ohio, entered the national consciousness as a place where supposedly Haitians were eating pets (which was never true). Now, there is real terror in Springfield, but it’s not coming from the local Haitian population.

It comes from the forces that Ohio’s own senator, JD Vance, the GOP candidate for vice president, and his running mate, Donald Trump, have unleashed on the city with their relentless bad faith attacks, manifesting now in the form of more than 30 bomb threats that have paralyzed the city’s institutions, necessitating a semi-permanent deployment of state police to Springfield’s schools.

Local children who are forced to wait for the all-clear from bomb-sniffing dogs, if their parents have let them go to school at all, are not being harmed by the Haitian population. They are being harmed by the Republican presidential campaign ticket, who see them as essentially cannon fodder in a messaging war waged for reasons of political expediency and power.

As to the false story about Haitians devouring pets, it has fallen apart completely. Erika Lee, the Springfield woman whose note on Facebook set off the fervor has acknowledged it was little more than a rumor. She is regretful and has deleted her original Facebook post.

A Wall Street Journal correspondent visited a separate Springfield woman, Anna Kilgore, who filed a police report about a missing cat. But Kilgore later discovered that the kitty, Miss Sassy, had been found safe and sound in her own basement. Like Lee, Kilgore apologized and regretted the trouble that has come to her hometown and her neighbors, the Haitians, who are here legally with the full blessing of the federal government.

But two other people aren’t apologizing for the matter: Vance and Trump, as they continue pushing the lie.

Vance all but admitted that he wasn’t strictly sticking to the facts when he said on CNN last weekend that he saw it necessary to “create stories” to focus media attention on some diffuse plight of Americans in Ohio, in one swoop acknowledging that this tale about dog and cat tails didn’t have legs, refusing to apologize for spreading this misinformation, and then once again pushing the narrative that there is something nefarious afoot in his state.

While it’s true that any municipality would face some growing pains receiving a large new population with its own unique set of needs and particular culture, but Haitians have also helped reverse population decline and stabilize economic growth.

Despite the frequent moniker of “migrants,” not all of this population are recent-arrival asylum-seekers; most are years-long residents with temporary protected status, residing and working legally in the city. As we’ve noted multiple times before, even the asylum seekers are not unlawfully present, but undergoing a formal process as laid out by both U.S. and international law.

Vance and Trump have fixated on this false story because there is no equivalent real story of horrors resulting from the population of Haitians in Ohio.

That’s all without mentioning the Haitian population itself, a group that has suffered plenty and worked to reestablish lives in the United States only to now be put at direct risk for what are, at their core, openly racist tropes of the kind that we had once hoped would no longer be acceptable in mainstream U.S. political discourse.

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