(AFP) – Several schools in the small town of Springfield, Ohio, were evacuated Friday, the second day of worrying disruptions amid anti-Haitian-immigrant tensions stoked by Donald Trump and his Republican Party. Springfield’s authorities closed a middle school and evacuated two elementary schools, the local Springfield News-Sun newspaper and other media reported. The disruptions — which come after similar evacuations Thursday in reaction to an emailed bomb threat — followed an unspecified warning from the Springfield police department, the reports said.
The head of the local Haitian community center, Viles Dorsainvil, told AFP that the FBI was also investigating threatening phone calls to the organization. The Ohio town has been suddenly thrust into the national spotlight after a conspiracy theory — quickly debunked by local authorities — spread on social media that members of the Haitian immigrant community had stolen and eaten the predominately white population’s pets. Trump told reporters in California on Friday that he would do “large deportations” of Haitians from Springfield.
President Joe Biden said at the White House that Trump “has to stop” inflaming tensions, and “there’s no place in America for this.” The bizarre story took off last week with a post on social media site X claiming that “ducks and pets are disappearing.” It was then quickly amplified by Republican politicians, X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk, and Trump himself — including during his nationally televised debate Tuesday with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Trump, the Republican White House candidate, is seizing on the fake story to fuel his campaign message that the United States faces an “invasion” of illegal immigrants, whom he characterizes as violent criminals and escapees from “insane asylums.” On Thursday, Trump said that locals in Springfield faced “20,000 illegals” who were “destroying their entire way of life.” “Nobody knows where they come from. I’m angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens,” Trump added.
Biden, speaking at a Black excellence brunch at the White House, said there was a “proud Haitian American community that’s under attack in our country right now, it’s simply wrong.” “This has to stop, what he’s doing, it has to stop,” the president said of Trump.
Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, posted Friday on X that Springfield has seen “a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime. This is what happens when you drop 20,000 people into a small community.” The Haitian community in Springfield is part of an influx of immigrants who have a legally protected status since their home countries are in upheaval.
The Ohio town had seen years of falling population and economic decline as manufacturing industries moved away. The arrival of an estimated 20,000 Haitians has been credited with reviving the local economy but has also put strains on public services in a town that the 2020 Census found had a population of 58,000. Tensions first erupted in the open last year when a recently arrived Haitian driver collided his minivan with a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy, Aiden Clark.
Anti-immigrant activists have seized on that incident, but the child’s father this week issued an impassioned plea for politicians to back off. “They can vomit all the hate they want,” Nathan Clark said. “However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden.”
– Nicholas Roll with Sebastian Smith in Washington
© 2024 AFP
