Springfield Schools Forced to Go Remote, Bring in State Troopers From Trump & Vance’s Racist Lies

It’s been well over a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began pushing the racist conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating people’s cats and dogs. And the horrific, predictable fallout of their lies is continuing to escalate, even as law enforcement and other local authorities say there’s no evidence that any of this is happening.

This week, two colleges in the small town—Wittenberg University and Clark State Community College—were forced to go remote amid threats of violence. Both reported receiving threats of mass campus shootings, while Wittenberg additionally reported a bomb threat. At the same time, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, was forced to send state troopers to “each of the Springfield school district’s 18 buildings” for “the foreseeable future,” he said in a Monday statement.

“We must take every threat seriously, but children deserve to be in school, and parents deserve to know that their kids are safe. The added security will help ease some of the fears caused by these hoaxes,” DeWine said. Of course, the racist hoax he’s referring to is coming from within his own party—specifically, the presidential candidate DeWine has thrown his full support behind.

Robert Baker, a political science professor at Wittenberg, told Inside Higher Ed on Tuesday that his “students expressed a lot of concern and fear,” and “some actually left Wittenberg Saturday, went home and said they weren’t going to come back until they felt safer.”

The dangerous lie originally emerged from a Facebook post from a right-wing account earlier this month, later pushed by neo-Nazis on Twitter. The post in question seems to allude to an August incident in Canton, Ohio—200 miles away from Springfield—involving a resident who was arrested for killing and attempting to eat a cat. (The woman is a citizen.) There’s no evidence at all of Haitian migrants stealing or harming people’s pets, and, again, Springfield police say they haven’t received any such reports.

During the pandemic, manufacturing and warehouse jobs drew some 20,000 Haitian migrants to Springfield. Most have legal immigration status, work authorization, and valid Social Security numbers, though that obviously shouldn’t matter. Despite their legal immigration status, Republicans are aiming to stoke fear about Haitian migrants’ growing numbers in a once predominantly white, working-class community—and to attack Kamala Harris for the Biden administration’s program to offer temporary protected status to Haitian migrants.

Over the weekend, Vance stopped by several cable news shows and all but conceded he’s been “[creating] stories” about Haitian migrants “so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.” Of course, all his lies have done is unleash entirely needless suffering on his own constituents in a cynical ploy to win the election.