“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.”
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
“To justify Vance’s continued promotion of what he himself had described as “rumors” that might not be true, the candidate’s staff on Tuesday gave the Journal “a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors.” But “when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.” Kilgore, who was “wearing a Trump shirt and hat,” said “she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”
The “cat-eating rumors,” the Journal notes, “started with a post by a Springfield woman on a private Facebook page.” That account “turned out to be third-hand” and was “subsequently disavowed by the original poster, according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation.”
This is the sort of evidence that Vance apparently had in mind when he told CNN’s Dana Bash that his information about pet-eating immigrants “comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents.””
“The claim is false, but that didn’t stop Trump from spreading it during Tuesday evening’s presidential debate, declaring that “the people that came in” are “eating the pets of the people that live” in Springfield, Ohio.
The strange idea that Ohio is home to pet kidnappers and eaters was popularized in part by that state’s senator, JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee. On Monday morning, Vance posted on X the false claim that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” In the same tweet, he claimed that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.”
The claim has caught fire among the GOP and has now made it all the way to the party’s leader.
For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.
More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s Monday suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Trump and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration.
Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, the United States experienced a surge of migrants at its southern border — much of it fueled by unrest in several Caribbean and Latin American nations following the Covid-19 pandemic. Republicans used this wave of migration to attack Biden’s border policies, and to claim there was a crisis at the border. Meanwhile, busing efforts by Republican leaders in border states sent large groups of migrants to cities and towns across the country, putting many Americans face to face with migrants for the first time.
All of this comes amid a competitive 2024 presidential race, where both candidates have rushed to frame themselves as tough on immigration. Trump has long campaigned on restricting immigration, while Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has touted a strict border security bill that she supports — and which Trump pushed his fellow Republicans to kill.
These factors — perhaps most of all the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment — probably explain why a sitting senator felt it was wise to share a meme claiming that if Americans don’t vote for former President Donald Trump, immigrants will eat your cats, and why a former president repeated the vile claim during a national debate.”
“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.””
Exclusive: How Biden botched the border Alex Thompson and Stef W. Kight. 2024 2 12. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/12/how-biden-botched-border Biden faces more criticism about the US-Mexico border, one of his biggest problems heading into 2024 Will Weissert and Adriana Gomez. 2023 10 7. AP.
“it’s important to understand that when we talk about “gangs,” we’re not talking about the exclusively criminal business enterprises seen, for example, in Mexico’s drug cartels. Since at least the 1990s, various leaders in Haiti have relied upon gangs to assert their political will; Chérizier, for example, was allegedly affiliated with Moïse prior to his assassination. As the AP reported, “the state has grown fatally weak and gangs are stepping in to take its place.
In other words, Haitian gangs are best understood as armed political actors. The current crisis is not just a security one but a political one as well.”’
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“Armed groups have been intimately connected with Haitian politics since the mid-20th century, when François “Papa Doc” Duvalier established the Tontons Macoutes to terrorize perceived enemies of his regime. Such groups have been “deeply involved with political actors as well, in terms of control for elections, protecting businesses, going after rival businesses,” Jake Johnston, senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Vox.”
“Lawmakers are warning a “catastrophic situation” in Haiti may worsen the migrant crisis as a loose alliance of armed gangs threaten to seize control of the nation, where the acting leader is missing.
Gang violence has plagued the Caribbean nation for more than two years since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. But the crisis has escalated in recent days, when armed gangs overran two of Haiti’s biggest prisons, released thousands of inmates and tried to take control of the country’s main airport.”