How Haitian Immigrants Are Fighting Back Against Trump and Vance’s Smears

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They’ve filed criminal charges.

They’re talking to the media.

They’ve spoken out at the U.N.

And they’re organizing politically.

As anti-Haitian rhetoric and lies continue to spread, sparking violence and intimidation against immigrants from the overwhelmingly Black country, they and their allies are fighting back.

Even as former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance continue to promote false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating household pets, Haitian-American leaders and community members are resisting pressure for them to flee the U.S. or disappear from public life.

Their staunch resistance underscores their ancestry as descendants of the first enslaved Black people in the Western Hemisphere to liberate themselves and their entire country from slavery, scholars said. This spirit of standing, of fighting, is ingrained in the very fiber of Haiti and its people.

“We are a proud people. Despite all of the difficulties, we have always been able to lift ourselves up. The first Black republic in the world, Haiti is proud of that, of its heroic fight for freedom and dignity,” Edgard Leblanc Fils, president of Haiti’s transitional council, told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday in remarks that spanned political unrest in the country and how Haitians are being treated during the current American political cycle.

He took veiled aim at Trump and Vance’s comments saying, “The passions that naturally arise during an election campaign should never serve as a pretext for xenophobia or racism in a country such as the United States, a country forged by immigrants from all countries, and which has become a model of democracy for the world.”

In Springfield, the verbal attacks and intimidation during this political season have been emotionally difficult and have forced some Haitian families to restrict their activities and some have even considered leaving.

Over the past few weeks, Springfield has received 33 bomb threats, which strained city services. Haitian residents there and elsewhere have complained to local support groups and authorities about verbal and physical intimidation, and break-ins.

Even so, Haitian community organizations are supporting their efforts to resist and make bold counter offenses.

The California-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit group supporting that community, filed criminal charges against Trump and Vance in Clark County Municipal Court on Tuesday, alleging that their remarks have led to an unsafe environment for Haitians in Springfield.

Despite receiving racist emails and comments and suffering a swatting attack — a false report of an ongoing serious crime in order to elicit a response from law enforcement — journalists at The Haitian Times have kept reporting on what is happening in their community, including compiling a list of ways to help.

A nonprofit group in Springfield, the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, which has been inundated with requests for support from Haitians worried for their safety, has given voice to community members by speaking to media outlets on their behalf.

Multiple Haitian groups, such as Ayisyen pou Harris — Creole for “Haitians for Harris” — are harnessing that spirit of fighting back and channeling that frustration and outrage into political action. They are rallying behind Harris’ presidential bid and encouraging others to do likewise.

The moves come two weeks after another Haitian organization, the National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, demanded that the Trump-Vance campaign retract “offensive statements and engage in meaningful dialogue to address the harm caused.”

In its affidavit, the Haitian Bridge Alliance wrote: “Trump and Vance have knowingly spread a false and dangerous narrative by claiming that Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community is criminally killing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats, and killing and eating geese.

“They accused Springfield’s Haitians of bearing deadly disease. They repeated such lies during the presidential debate, at campaign rallies, during interviews on national television, and on social media.”

Though some legal scholars say the case may not gain traction, bringing awareness through filing is the point.

Neighborhood kids gather to sell Kool-Aid and chips earlier this month in Springfield, Ohio. Some were kept home from school because of the bomb threats at their schools. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Roots in revolution

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. with Haitian ancestry. There are large enclaves of Haitians in Miami, New York and New Jersey, Boston, and most recently, in Springfield, Ohio, where city officials told The New York Times an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 have settled — some decades ago and others over the past few years.

Under the Biden administration, Haitians who arrived in the United States on or before June 3, 2024, can remain under Temporary Protected Status through Feb. 3, 2026, and can also renew their status.

The status is a federal designation that allows those fleeing upheaval in their homelands — such as civil unrest or natural disasters — a chance to stay in America legally.

Yet, Haitian migrants have long been treated with disdain by American politicians and scapegoated by those looking to peddle misinformation about the first independent Black country in the Western Hemisphere, experts in politics and Haitian history said.

“Haiti has been a beacon, a place people could look to and say ‘Those are free people, and they freed themselves’,” said Niambi Carter, an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland and author of American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship.

“Since Haitian independence, the West has held a huge grudge,” Carter said. “Haiti has gotten it particularly bad as the first free Black republic in the West.”

Upon gaining its independence, Haiti was forced to make reparations repayment to France’s slaveholders and their descendents — an amount that is estimated to be at least $20 billion in today’s dollars.

The country has, for many generations, been the target of racist economic policies — such as America’s 20-year occupation and financial control of the country during the early 1900s, said Carter, who is writing a book on U.S.-Haitian refugee policy spanning the administrations of Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden.

This economic disenfranchisement, coupled with devastating weather events and waves of illness that have struck the island over the years, plus its own political turmoil, has left Haiti as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

“Haiti has gotten a raw deal in the sense of the diplomacy it has received,” Carter said. “It has been ignored, undermined, and destabilized.

And, yet, she added, Haitians are enduring.

Standing tall in the face of viral vitriol

The recent attacks spawned by the Trump campaign have been steady. Shortly after filing criminal charges, the Haitian Bridge Alliance said they faced blowback.

“Since we’ve filed the affidavit, our organization has been barraged with harassment and hate-filled messages at the office, email, and individual phones,” said Erik Crew, a staff attorney at Haitian Bridge Alliance.

The group has vowed to stand by the Haitian community in Springfield and press its case in court.

An Ohio community activist who has been assisting Haitian families in Springfield said that she, too, has faced threats. She asked that her name be withheld out of concern for her family’s safety.

She plans on continuing to fight for the Haitian community.

“They’re not going to scare me off,” she said. “I’m already in it.”

The Haitian Times’ founder, Garry Pierre-Pierre, recently told The New York Times that one of his editors was “swatted” and police were sent to her home after someone falsely claimed a murder was committed there.

In its dedication to continue reporting the news, the organization shut down its website’s comment section, which was overrun with racist comments, and canceled a planned forum in Springfield.

Over the past year or so, Springfield, a sleepy, predominantly white, Rust Belt hamlet, saw its population swell after a push to draw new businesses and labor to town proved a magnet for newly arrived Haitians on Temporary Protected Status.

City officials and longtime residents initially rejoiced at the newcomers’ arrival and the boon to the local industry. Many of them still do.

However, last year, when a minivan driven by a Haitian migrant using a foreign license crashed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy and injured 23 others, simmering racial tensions erupted. Some residents packed municipal meetings to complain about the Haitian migrants and used such phrases as “criminals.”

The vitriol went viral in conservative online and social media spaces until, ultimately, it wended its way into Trump and Vance’s election year talking points.

“This is not new in the United States of America; it’s an old playbook used around election times that is anti-Black and that these so-called savages are trying to destroy your way of life,” said Crew, whose family migrated to Ohio from the American South during the Jim Crow-era. His grandmother told them stories about watching as a girl as the Ku Klux Klan marched in Springfield’s streets. “This goes back hundreds of years.”

Amid the current fallout, other Haitian groups said they, too, have witnessed an increasingly toxic brew of racist comments and threats.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to Capital B’s request for comment. When previously contacted by Capital B, the campaign did not directly address calls from Haitian groups for a retraction and a conversation and instead issued a statement indicating that the media should focus on “the very real suffering and tragedies experienced by the people of Springfield, Ohio.”

During his rally on Monday in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town that has also seen an increase in Haitian migrants, Trump once again doubled down on vilifying the group by asking residents: “Has your beautiful town changed?” He said of Haitian migrants in Springfield: “You have to get them the hell out.”

At the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, volunteers have worked long hours to try and meet the emotional and physical needs of the community.

Many of those they help are afraid to speak publicly for fear of retribution. Some have contemplated leaving altogether, volunteers from support groups and attorneys said.

When a Springfield man, according to a police report, allegedly recently barged into a Haitian family’s garage and threatened the children playing there with a gun while yelling for them to shut the “fuck up,” they called the police.

And though the family, according to the report, was scared to press charges for fear of retribution and the children are now no longer allowed to play outside, that act took courage, Crew said.

Calling out the ugliness that has seeped into the public sphere is a fight that has even reached the halls of Congress.

This week, when Republican U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, in a now-deleted social media post called Haitian migrants “thugs” and “slapstick gangsters” who needed to get “their ass out of our country,” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Rep. Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat, reportedly confronted him, called for a House Committee on Ethics investigation and a House censure. Horsford took to the House floor on Wednesday to raise his concerns.

Higgins told CNN that he stood by his comments and cited freedom of speech.

Horsford clapped right back and vowed to push for censure against “divisive, racially charged, hateful rhetoric.”

“It is not about the next election. It is about everyday people in America feeling targeted,” he told CNN. “Today, it’s the Haitians. Who will it be tomorrow? Will it be you?”

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