There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and just as in English, Haitian Kreyòl is rich in proverbs and idioms about our four-legged friends. The one I’ve been thinking about this month, as Donald Trump and his toady JD Vance have weaponised heinous disinformation against Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, translates as, “If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies.”
The idea goes some way toward explaining the Republicans’ strategy this election season: if you want to deport innocents en masse, which they do, say those innocents are savages, beyond civilisation’s reach. Claim they are spreading infectious diseases, taking the jobs and benefits meant for legitimate residents, driving down wages and generally steering our Small-Town USAs into penury and disgrace. Call them illegal aliens who are invading the nation, casting fraudulent ballots and poisoning its blood. If none of that works, say they cannot distinguish pets from food.
None of this is true, of course. The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield, whose numbers range from 12,000 to 15,000, reside there legally. They have fled political violence and a state breakdown that is, ironically, at least partly the result of American meddling and subversion of their own democracy. The United States intervened in Haiti’s pivotal post-quake election of 2010, all but handing the presidency to Michel Martelly; and then looked away as he and his coterie in the Parti Haitien Tet Kale (PHTK) spent the next decade pillaging coffers, and arming gangs to squash those who objected. In April 2024, the US sanctioned Martelly for facilitating drug trafficking and sponsoring gangs.
In Ohio, Haitians work, pay rent and file their taxes. Most have arrived over the past three years, according to local reports, as beneficiaries of President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole programmes, and as should have been expected, the city has experienced growing pains and strained social services.
Claims that Haitians are eating pets, however, have been thoroughly debunked. The 35-year-old Springfield resident who started that rumour on Facebook has said she was sorry for lying and tried to retract it, but it was too late for that. The cat was not eaten but it was already out of the bag.
It turns out that when it comes to Haiti and/or migration, facts are often irrelevant. Vance, who has issued calumny upon calumny against the Haitians of Springfield, copped on national TV to “creat[ing] stories” about immigrants in order to bring attention to “the suffering of the American people”. What a hero, willing to martyr the truth to such a noble end! Too bad that his fictions, along with his boss’s, have caused suffering in Springfield. The parents of an 11-year-old killed last year in a vehicle accident involving a Haitian driver have seen the death of their child politicised in ways they find reprehensible and excruciating. “Don’t spin this toward hate,” the child’s father pleaded at a city commission meeting about the Republican-generated mess.
Since the Republican ticket has spread these lies, bomb scares and shooting threats have shut down schools, colleges, grocery stores and hospitals. A “beloved” annual cultural festival in the city was canceled “in light of recent threats and safety concerns”. A local debate for county and state offices in advance of the November election — also canceled. It’s as though the whole city had been doxxed, their private details exposed to abuse from America’s worst trolls. Speaking of doxxed, on 16 September the editor-in-chief of the Haitian Times — a venerable immigrant newspaper based in the US — was “swatted”, when someone falsely reported a murder at her home, sending half a dozen armed police officers to her door. This presumably in retribution for covering the threats and harassment that Ohio’s Haitians have experienced in the wake of Republican smears.
On top of all that, Trump is threatening to visit the beleaguered city in the coming weeks, something the mayor, Rob Rue, really wishes he wouldn’t do. At a rally on 18 September, Trump managed to stuff four lies — about the number, legal status, and rate of growth of Springfield’s Haitian population, as well as the city’s crime rate — into just 25 words.
It’s not Haitian migrants who threaten Springfield, or America’s democracy. It’s the Republican-led, lie-filled uproar over Haitians.
The disinformation about the pets is vile, but perhaps more dangerous is the Republicans’ repeated insistence on the falsehood that the Haitians in Springfield are “illegal”. They are laying the rhetorical groundwork for a mass deportation scheme of immigrants. According to the latest polls, 54 per cent of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat support” the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Many Americans do not realise that many recent arrivals to the United States have full permission to be here under humanitarian protection programmes. Which is just as Trump and Vance like it.
Springfield residents do know better. On 19 September, Vivek Ramaswamy — the also-ran Trump surrogate and perhaps the smarmiest man in America — convened a town hall in the besieged city, along with the extreme-right organisation Moms for Liberty. One participant, identifying himself as a Trump voter, pointed out: “Most if not nearly all the immigrants here are here legally, so the notion of deporting all of them and then everything will be okay is not rooted in reality.” The implied question that followed: why is Trump threatening (or promising, depending on where you stand) to deport them?
Mass deportations of unauthorised immigrants would be economically ruinous for the US, experts say. Deporting people who have benefitted from Temporary Protected Status or humanitarian parole, or who are seeking asylum, would be yet more ruinous — and also illegal. When you want to kill a law, say the law is unconscionable. The Republicans’ goal is to strip migrants of their legitimacy, in rhetoric if not in reality. Again, reality is not what counts here. “If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance word-saladed at a rally in Raleigh, N.C., on 18 September.
Mass deportations are, for now, beside the point. The point is to get Americans salivating over the idea of mass deportations — to galvanise fear, anger and dispossession, and turn them into votes. Solidarity through sadism.
Last week I was asked why Trump is fixated on Haiti. Racism is part of the answer — more specifically, Trump’s decades-long willingness to profit from latent racism for personal gain. Trump allegedly discriminated against Black tenants in his properties in the seventies; took out a full-page ad calling for the lynching of innocent Black teens, the Central Park Five, in 1989; and in the 2010s propounded birther lies against the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama.
But Trump also seems to have a particular obsession with Haiti, top on his list of “shithole countries”, and with Haitians, top on the list of deportees. Why?
My surmise is that Haiti is a lazy bigot’s punchline. It doesn’t require imagination or intellect to pick on Haiti; and in fact, the less an American knows about Haiti, the easier it is to turn it into a bogeyman. For more than 200 years, Haiti has served the US as an inexhaustible symbol, a screen onto which we project our fears and insecurities. It has provided us our ultimate Other — and has been doing so, since the birth of the two countries, just 30 years apart. The first and second republics in the Western hemisphere — the United States and Haiti — are like siblings separated, or estranged, at birth. The slaveholder Thomas Jefferson was US president when Haiti’s first leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, abolished slavery and declared all Haitians, no matter their skin tone level, Black. The United States would not abolish slavery for 60 more years. “Haiti is Black and we have never forgiven Haiti for being Black,” Frederick Douglass said in 1893, and often this still rings true.
But the anti-Haitian dog-whistle of today has frequencies beyond simple racism. It has much to do with fears of American decline — economic, democratic and spiritual — and looking for an easy culprit. “We’re at the stage right now where we have been cut down and called racist not only in print but also to our faces at city commission meetings,” said one woman at the Ramaswamy meeting, feeling smeared by her opposition to Haitian migrants in Springfield.
And yet, the dog-whistle seems to resonate louder outside of Springfield, far from any actual Haitians, than inside the city. In Springfield, there are tensions, for sure, but there has also been an outpouring of support for Haitians: peace rallies, singing vigils, donations. A local law firm has helped a national organisation, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, file criminal charges against Trump and Vance for their roles in the mayhem. And ever since 10 September, when the lie about Haitians’ dietary habits took off, the lines at Rose Goute Creole restaurant, in Springfield, have reportedly been halfway out the door.
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