“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.
The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.
You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”
The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.
“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.
Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.
Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.
In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.
On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”
“There is a “small number of non-detained migrants” who have been convicted of homicide but can’t be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn’t have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but “non-detained” people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” explained the Department of Homeland Security in a Saturday statement, “the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration.””
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“The number of convicted criminals on ICE’s nondetained docket hasn’t grown significantly under President Joe Biden, reported The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. In August 2016, five months before Trump took office, there were 368,574 on the docket; in June 2021, five months into Biden’s presidency, there were 405,786; and in December 2022, nearly two years into Biden’s presidency, there were 407,983.
As he campaigns ahead of the presidential election next month, Trump has routinely said outrageous, misleading, and false things about immigrants and crime. He often talks about a “migrant crime” wave and claims that it “is taking over America.” Much like his migrant murderers claim, the true picture looks very different. Crime decreased in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas’ Operation Lone Star busing activities, per NBC News. “The most recent significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020,” Cato Institute Associate Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier told Reason in March, “when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
Trump paints a terrifying picture of migrants and migration, but the reality is far more nuanced and far less dangerous than he would suggest.”
“Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.”
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“The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.”
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“Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren’t directly impacted by Trump’s deportation plan.”
“In reality, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was shaped by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a second Trump term agenda along these lines is very real, and though the Project 2025 initiative itself has seemingly fizzled out, other groups have picked up the slack.
Furthermore, many of Project 2025’s key proposals — to centralize presidential power, crack down on unauthorized immigrants, deprioritize fighting climate change, and eliminate the Department of Education — are fully and openly supported by Trump.
Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on a vitally important issue where Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.
The project’s plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in several ways. Trump, wary of these proposals’ unpopularity, has said during the campaign that he won’t support some of them. He also evidently feels hesitant to outright disavow the social conservatives who have long been a key part of his base.”
“What plainly irks the governor is how Trump and Vance keep calling the Haitians “illegal” migrants.
“To say that these people are illegal is just not right, you can’t make up stuff like that,” DeWine told me.
He repeatedly criticized President Biden’s handling of the border, but pointed out that’s a different matter than the Haitians who are in the country with Temporary Protected Status.
“Throughout my entire lifetime we’ve had programs similar to that that,” DeWine said, alluding to the Hungarians and Cubans who fled conflict for America. “We have said we’re going to let certain people in because of the great oppression that they are feeling, or the danger they are feeling. We ought to be a country that is capable of doing that.”
Of course, that would be to presuppose that such nuances matter to Trump and Vance, particularly when portraying migrants as threats is so politically rewarding in the heat of a campaign.”
“If you go to Tijuana, right up to the border wall, you can see a deportation in its final throes. At the edge of a Mexican freeway that runs along the border, there’s a nondescript metal door. On any given morning, a Mexican official will open the padlock on the Mexican side and an American immigration agent will open the padlock on the U.S. side. Then, dozens—sometimes hundreds — of people get pushed back into Mexico. Some wander to shelters; others end up camping just outside the door, as if staying close by might improve their chances of getting back in. That deportation door got plenty of use under Donald Trump. But perhaps no president has used it more than Joe Biden.
You wouldn’t have guessed that watching Trump’s 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, where Trump brutalized the Biden-Harris administration over Biden’s immigration record, accusing the president of throwing the border open.”
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” Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the country, and that’s allowed Trump to repeatedly — almost gleefully — claim he’ll deport “millions” of people every year if he takes back the White House, something he says Biden is too feckless to do. It plays into his narrative that Biden is decrepit. If deportations are a gas pedal, Trump has portrayed Biden as a lethargic octogenarian, too impaired to drive over 10 mph. In reality, Biden has that gas pedal pushed almost all the way to the floor. Under Biden, migrants have been removed from the U.S. at a blistering pace, pushing the country’s deportation infrastructure to its limit. And it’s not clear how Trump could top him if he takes back the White House next year.
Biden’s migrant removals started as soon as he took office. In the spring of 2021, deep in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in a camp in Tijuana, where some migrants were so hopeful the new president would let them in that they flew “BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” flags outside their tents. But most of them who crossed got a slap from reality: They were quickly frog-marched by U.S. Border Patrol back through the deportation doorway, back to the squalid camps in cartel turf. Others got rapidly loaded onto ICE planes and flown back to Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever. As the number of people crossing the border grew during Biden’s first two years in office, these expulsions reached a scorching pace. ICE charter flights bounced around the globe like Taylor Swift’s jet. According to data collected by Tom Cartwright, a researcher with the advocacy group Witness at the Border, there were more ICE flights in the air during the early Biden years than ever before.
Biden’s expulsion regime was made possible by the most radical shift in immigration policy of the last 50 years: Title 42. When Biden took office, he undid dozens of Trump’s immigration policies, but he kept in place Trump’s most consequential ban, the public health statute Title 42. Using the pandemic as pretext, Title 42 gave the president the power to rapidly expel migrants without the normal court process. During just his first two years in office, Biden used it to kick out over 2.8 million migrants. That’s a stunning number. In Trump’s entire time in the White House, his administration removed only 2 million people total.
There’s an important caveat here. Even though millions of migrants got expelled during Biden’s first years in office, the number of deportations actually shrunk. Though they’re both a form of removal, expulsion and deportations are different: Title 42 expulsions were a brand new phenomenon. They could happen rapidly, without a trial, and the subject was almost always arrested near the border. Deportations, on the other hand, only come after an immigration judge officially orders someone removed, and they often involve people arrested in the interior. During Biden’s first two years in office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported under 200,000 people total — less than any single year during the Trump era.
You might think that’s because Biden didn’t want to deport people. His administration may have been comfortable kicking out migrants who just arrived, but deporting immigrants who have been here a long time is, of course, a different story. That hesitation was likely part of the reason deportations shrunk during the early Biden years. But there’s another reason: ICE — along with all the country’s deportation infrastructure — had been surged to the border. To handle the huge number of new arrivals, the administration sent ICE agents to assist Border Patrol, and that took government workers away from arresting people in the interior. Meanwhile, ICE Air flights were filled to the brim with recent border crossers; they literally didn’t have room for other deportees.
As soon as Title 42 ended in May 2023, deportations immediately skyrocketed to historic numbers. According to data analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Biden “removed or returned” 775,000 unauthorized immigrants from May 2023 to May 2024. That’s more than any previous year since 2010. (For comparison, Trump’s record for removals in one year maxed out at under 612,000 — and that was with Title 42 in place.)
Maybe, if he takes office next year, Trump will be able to get a bit more juice out of the deportation system and get his numbers higher. However, there are indications that the country’s deportation system is at its redline. With the current manpower and equipment, it just might not be possible to deport that many more people.”
“Early in the administration, Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fundraiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.
But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.
Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Harris’ work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.
She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.
“Not a huge amount, but it ain’t chicken feed and that links to jobs,” said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.
Jonathan Fantini-Porter, the chief executive of the Partnership for Central America, the public-private partnership Harris helped lead, said the money had led to 30,000 jobs, with another 60,000 on the way as factories are constructed.
She also pushed Central American governments to work with the United States to create a program where refugees could apply for protection within the region.
Still, some of Harris’ critics said her focus on the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador was a mistake.
Most migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Obama and Trump administrations did come from those countries. But as migration from that region stabilized during the Biden administration, it exploded from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba.
The Northern Triangle countries accounted for roughly 500,700 of the 2.5 million crossings at the southwest border in the fiscal year of 2023, a 36% drop from the 2021 fiscal year, according to the Wilson Center.
“They didn’t care to do a good diagnosis of the issue, and they have just focused on a very small part of the topic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who has studied Latin American relations and their impact on migration. Correa-Cabrera said Harris had “failed completely” in her mission by following an outdated approach to tackling the root causes of migration.
Biden had a similar portfolio to Harris’ when he was vice president. He was in charge of addressing the economic problems in Central America by rallying hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for a region where the United States has a complicated legacy.”
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“Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, said Harris was essential in bringing together Latin American and American business leaders to drive investment in Central America.
Less than a week into her role, Zúñiga recalled, Harris sat with members of the national security team and economists from the Treasury Department. After a round of introductions, she quickly got into probing the personalities of the Latin American leaders with whom she would be interacting.
Zúñiga said he later watched her put the information she had collected into practice. In Mexico City, she connected with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador by expressing interest in the artwork at his presidential palace.
In Guatemala, she took a much more direct approach to President Alejandro Giammattei. She warned him last year about attempts to disrupt the handover of power of the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, while also pushing him to help form programs that migrants could use to apply for refuge in the United States closer to their home countries.
“She was curious and asked many questions,” Zúñiga said. “She very quickly realized that we weren’t going to solve 500 years of problematic history in a single term.””