Immigrants were revitalizing tiny Charleroi. Then Donald Trump’s attacks brought white supremacists and conservative influencers

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The day after former President Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pa., for a comeback rally after he survived an assassination attempt there, Marie Occimabia, 68, stood 75 miles away in her Charleroi shop surrounded by unsold clothing, luggage, and hair supplies. There were no customers.

Occimabia emigrated to Florida from Haiti in 1991, and in 2019, she moved her store to Charleroi to join a growing Haitian community that was breathing life into the Western Pennsylvania borough’s languishing downtown.

But now, she said, Charleroi’s downtown felt empty again. Her customers hadn’t been going out much since Trump began disparaging and spreading lies about Haitian immigrants, first in Springfield, Ohio, and soon after, in Charleroi, where he falsely said Haitian immigrants brought a crime surge and financial strain to the town, claiming that it’s on the precipice of bankruptcy.

Quickly, the former president’s claims thrust the small town, where, in reality, crime was down and bankruptcy was nowhere on the horizon, into an unwanted national spotlight, exposing fault lines and ratcheting up anxiety and tensions that show little sign of abating weeks later.

Trump’s attacks on the Western Pennsylvania town appear to have emboldened people whose views once seemed to sit on the fringes. Conservative YouTubers have panned their cameras around Charleroi’s streets looking for Haitians, and a Ku Klux Klan flier circulated on social media directed at the town’s immigrants. Massive stickers promoting a white supremacist group and declaring “Reclaim America” recently appeared on new traffic signal boxes downtown.

And on that recent Sunday after the former president’s Butler rally, a driver with Trump stickers on his bumper shouted at a small group of Haitian immigrants gathered in front of a church: “Trump is coming!”

Joe Manning, the borough manager in Charleroi, said the town that originally seemed to welcome immigrants has been tainted since Trump’s comments.

“By and large, these folks have received a lot of support in this community,” Manning said. ” … But now, that seems to have changed. I don’t know if it’s ever going to go back to the way it was.”

And while the former president’s comments were directed at the Haitian community in Charleroi, his claims impact immigrants from across the globe.

“Whether you are from a different part of the world, as long as you are Black, they think that you are Haitian,” said Amy Karpu, 25, a Liberian immigrant who moved to Charleroi from North Dakota and works at Fourth Street Foods, a local frozen food manufacturing company that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has hired hundreds of immigrants to fill jobs the factory’s owner said Americans didn’t want in the cold plant.

Out of approximately 1,100 employees, about 700 workers hail from 40 different countries, including Haiti, Liberia, China, and Indonesia. “It’s like the United Nations,” said David Barbe, 71, the owner of Fourth Street Foods.

Karpu and Barbe have both noticed that Haitians and other immigrants have become less visible since Trump’s comments, sheltering inside and hesitant to mingle.

“They’re wondering why, why are they being targeted?” Barbe said. “You know, all they want to do is work.”

Charleroi is one of many towns in Western Pennsylvania that saw its economy decline as factories closed and people moved away over the last few decades. More recently, the economy has picked up as entrepreneurs like Occimabia and Augusta “Queen” Goll, 43, a Liberian immigrant and the owner of Queen’s Market, moved in.

With a beaming smile, Goll, who moved to Charleroi from Arizona about five years ago, threw her arms around customers, who were almost all immigrants, on that recent Sunday. They purchased oxtail, jasmine rice, plantains and other groceries while speaking French, Spanish, and Creole.

Down the street, a closed-on-Sunday gift shop displayed Trump merchandise in the windows. On a nearby block, a coffee shop with mostly white customers prominently displayed merchandise made by Black Rifle, the coffee company inspired by the AR-15, a sign of conservatism. Even in Queen’s Market, a decorative license plate advertised TRUMP from behind Goll’s counter, a relic from her recent past as a Trump supporter.

Goll, a Republican, said she cried when she removed Trump stickers from her car. She believed he was strong and patriotic, and encouraged hard work. But his comments about Haitian immigrants at the presidential debate hurt both her feelings and her business — most of her customers are Haitian. When he chose to lie about the immigrant communities instead of talking about his plans for the country, he lost her vote, she said.

“I gotta be with my people,” she said.

She said she wishes Trump would leave alone immigrants like the Haitians she knows in Charleroi who are already legally living, working, and paying taxes after being granted Temporary Protected Status — a humanitarian legal status that Trump wants to revoke for Haitians.

“When you come in power, if you come in power, you have to make sure that they are here legally,” she said of Trump. “And if they are here legally, leave them alone.”

Anthony Staub, 37, who’s originally from Virginia, regularly shops alongside immigrants at Queen’s Market. Staub, who said he has lived in Charleroi for about a decade and works at a glass plant that’s on the verge of closing, said the influx of businesses that came with the influx of immigrants has improved his life.

“It used to be a lot of vacant buildings,” he said. “You couldn’t get any food here. You couldn’t get clothes here.”

Staub said he stopped using a local Facebook group because of the way some locals talk about immigrants, and he recently saw someone rev their motorcycle next to an immigrant family, engulfing the children with exhaust fumes. He said he heard a local complain about immigrants by saying: “If they have a business, why can’t I open up a business?”

And the anti-immigration rhetoric isn’t just directed toward people who look different from most of those who were born and raised in Charleroi. Barbe, the factory owner; Manning, the borough manager; and Pittsburgh-based immigration attorney Joseph Patrick Murphy, who are all white, have also been on the receiving end of vitriol about immigrants in Charleroi.

Murphy, 55, who has worked with Haitian immigrants in the town for several years, said that while he received threatening comments online before Trump’s claims, they’ve since escalated. He previously never felt like it was dangerous to go down to Charleroi, but now that’s changed.

Barbe has been accused of hiring unpermitted workers, and a former council member of a nearby borough falsely claimed his workers are slaves, he said. But many immigrants in Charleroi are there legally, according to Murphy, contrary to Trump’s claims. Barbe said he hires employees through staffing agencies that audit the workers and assure him they are certified to work, though, in a civil suit filed last month, the federal government alleged one of the staffing agencies used by Barbe sent some undocumented workers to Fourth Street Foods. Barbe said that for workers he hires directly, he uses the federal government’s E-Verify system to check their legal status. And agency workers from other countries actually cost more to hire than locals since some of the pay goes toward transportation and housing provided by the agencies, he said.

Lubona “Lulu” Mwale, a Zambian immigrant who moved to Charleroi from Kentucky in 2019, and now works as the plant’s director of community affairs, said that despite the recent tensions, she sees camaraderie among immigrants and those born in America who work in the factory together.

Those who work at the plant “get to talk to them and get to know them better, whereas, people outside the plant, the locals that don’t know the immigrants, they shy away and they make their own assumptions,” said Mwale, 46.

“They will say whatever they want to say and be critical of the immigrants that they don’t know,” she added.

With those critical voices only growing louder, a group of Haitian community leaders in Charleroi is trying to help educate people and mend the divide. Getro Bernabe, Charleroi’s immigrant community liaison, hosts meetings with immigrants to help them acclimate to the American town. And discussing the tensions that unraveled from Trump’s comments have been unavoidable. Some Haitians are even considering leaving Charleroi, he said.

“We are trying to minimize the impact, you know, of these negative rumors on the Haitian community,” Bernabe said.

Luciano Janvier, 41, a Haitian immigrant who lives in Charleroi and attends graduate school at PennWest University in California, Pa., said that Haitian immigrants have begun staying inside and keeping a lower profile in town in part because of complaints on Facebook about them gathering in groups outside.

“Every day I go to that platform to see what they are saying,” Janvier said.

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