In Ohio, Trump and Vance blame immigrants while voters want solutions

This article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings here.
Hello, friends. I’m writing from Flint, Michigan, where Donald Trump will rally Tuesday.
We’ve seen Springfield before
A week has passed since Trump, early in Tuesday’s debate, unleashed fury on a small Ohio city. “They’re eating the dogs,” Trump said of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, population 58,000. Days earlier, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, had amplified a series of internet rumors, claiming “Haitian illegal immigrants” were abducting and eating pets. Citizens of Springfield, Vance claimed, were “suffering” because of Haitian migrants.
As it were, many of the purported claims proved to be false. One viral social media post — a woman claiming her neighbor’s cat was stolen, perhaps by a Haitian neighbor — was later debunked by the woman who posted it. (”I messed up royally,” she said.) Another viral photo of a Black man carrying two geese proved to be from a different city entirely — and the man was cleaning up roadkill, not slaughtering pets. Another woman, charged with eating a cat, proved to be a lifelong Ohio resident, not a Haitian migrant.
“There’s a lot of garbage on the internet, and, you know, this is a piece of garbage that was simply not true,” Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor, said. “There’s no evidence of this at all.”
And now, the citizens of Springfield are having their lives disrupted because of these rumors.
On Thursday, Springfield’s city hall was evacuated due to bomb threats, as were several other buildings, including an elementary school. On Friday, two elementary schools were evacuated due to bomb threats and a middle school was closed, and some Haitian families sheltered in place for their safety. On Saturday, two local hospitals were forced into lockdown. On Sunday, a Springfield college canceled all on-campus activities after a shooting threat, and another local college announced its classes would be held online for the next week. On Monday, the city’s annual celebration of diversity, arts and culture was canceled, for the “safety of our residents and visitors.”
The Republican mayor of Springfield is exasperated, Politico reports. “Any political leader that takes the national stage and has the national spotlight needs to understand the gravity of the words that they have for cities like ours, and what they say impacts our city,” Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor, said. His city, he said, is “caught in a political vortex.”
“And for what it’s worth,” he added, “your pets are safe in Springfield, Ohio.”
If anyone can commiserate with what’s happening in Springfield, it’s the people of Whitewater, Wisconsin, an even smaller Midwestern city, which found itself in the middle of its own political vortex this year. In January, a far-right website ran a story about migrants “flooding” the small town. When Trump visited Green Bay in April, he made sure to single out the town: “Look no further than the tiny town of Whitewater, Wisconsin,” Trump declared at a rally on April 2. He claimed the city was “inundated” with “Biden migrants,” making it “a hotbed of cartel activity and illicit drugs, like no one has ever seen before.”
I spent three days in Whitewater in April, and I found a much different story. (You can read my full report here.) The town was, in fact, dealing with a drastic growth in its foreign population — between 800 and 1,000 migrants had arrived in the previous two years, and that came with challenges: schools were struggling to teach students with few English skills; the police department saw an uptick in unlicensed drivers; an increased demand in housing outpaced supply.
Quietly, the town’s residents worked to address the situation. A volunteer “immigration support group” banded together to help organize ESL classes, food and clothing supplies, and legal services. The school district worked to bring in Spanish-speaking teachers through a guest teacher visa program. A community center distributed food, clothing, furniture, bedding, books and games, free of charge.
Trump’s comments complicated things for the town. The work community members were already doing suddenly became a political lightning rod. “When all the kerfuffle first happened, I realized, I can’t do anything about the grandstanding at the border; I can’t do anything with the stalemate in Congress; but I can do this,” Kristine Zaballos, who runs the community center, told me. “Look around your community, and do what you can.”
Springfield is dealing with the same challenge. “When there is an influx of people arriving in a specific place, some people will feel threatened,” Viles Dorsainvil, president of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, told The Dispatch. What the city needs, though, is less fearmongering and more help: “More ESL classes and interpreters,” he said. “Cross-cultural education, which goes both ways.”
That is an important message that Trump, Vance and others could spread: the U.S. has seen an uptick in new arrivals over the past four years, and there is a desperate need to help them acclimate to their new life in the U.S. Spurts of immigration are accompanied by growing pains, as Springfield and Whitewater have seen. But there’s a good chance that the immigrants in your and my communities, just like those in Springfield, are also fueling economic growth. There’s a good chance that they aren’t in the country illegally, too: many Haitians in Springfield are beneficiaries of temporary protected status, making their presence in the U.S. legal.
The message Trump, Vance and others shouldn’t spread? The us-versus-them message that pits “Americans” and “migrants” at opposite ends of a zero-sum political spectrum. Vance, during a CNN hit Sunday, repeatedly spoke of his Ohio “constituents” and the migrants separately, as if Ohio’s newest arrivals aren’t his constituents, too. It’s not just inaccurate, but it’s bad politics: two-thirds of U.S. adults prefer a candidate “who focuses on solutions and says things like ‘we need to modernize our immigration system so that legal, hard-working migrants can legally come to our country, work and be a part of the American dream,’” according to polling from the National Immigration Forum.
“Most Americans know we need tangible solutions that strengthen our country,” Forum president and CEO Jennie Murray said. “They are not interested in fearmongering.”
On the topic of immigration: who deserves credit for the plunging border apprehension numbers this year? The Biden administration (and its executive orders) are first-in-line, though Mexico may merit equal recognition: Biden’s border strategy wouldn’t be possible without the help of Mexico, which has performed its own internal deportation operation, shuttling migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border all the way to the country’s south, forcing migrants to head north again. This cycle — sometimes called “el carrusel,” or the carousel — has caused some migrants to trek across Mexico six or seven times. Whether the system continues when a new Mexican president takes office in October, and a new U.S. president enters in January, is worth monitoring. How Mexico is helping Biden and Harris at the U.S. border (Mary Beth Sheridan, The Washington Post)
The MAGA MLM: The Trump campaign is testing a new, rewards-based program to encourage voter turnout. Campaign volunteers are told to target “hard-to-reach, low-propensity voters” — those that have shown interest in Trump, for example, but don’t frequently vote. For each one of those voters a campaign volunteer contacts, they inch closer to a series of rewards: collectible patches, t-shirts, expedited entry to rallies, collectors’ edition hats. Trump’s swing-state plan targets “sometimes” voters (Sophia Cai and Torey Van Oot, Axios)
A good piece of religion reporting from Minnesota, where Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’ home congregations are visited and observed. Walz, a self-described Minnesota Lutheran, is soft-spoken about his faith. But this dispatch from the Midwest offers a glimpse into the diverse, progressive Christianity that Walz identifies with. Lutherans in Walz’s Minnesota put potlucks before politics during divisive election season (Giovanna Dell’Orto, The Associated Press)
BONUS: Retired federal judge Thomas B. Griffith participated in a recent “60 Minutes” segment examining the ongoing fallout from the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Griffith, alongside a team of conservative legal scholars, examined the evidence of Trump’s “stolen election” claims. Rioters were duped, Griffith concluded: “All the evidence points in one direction,” he said. “And that is that President Biden won, and President Trump lost.” U.S. attorney explains Jan. 6 Capitol riot prosecutions
See you on the trail.
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