Former President Donald Trump made claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating people’s cats and dogs. Officials have said there is no evidence of immigrants eating cats and dogs, however Trump doubled down on his claim and accused Springfield, Ohio of being at the center of this dramatic issue.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in the city of Philadelphia. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The Springfield city manager said no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals in the immigrant community have been made, said David Muir, an ABC News anchor and American journalist who moderated the debate on Tuesday. Despite being fact-checked, Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, repeated the rumor this week.
The claim seems to originate from a social media post in which a netizen said their “neighbor’s daughter’s friend” had lost her cat. And then one day she came home from work and looked at her neighbor’s house, “where Haitians live” and saw her cat “hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, and they were carving it up to eat”. The social media user also claimed that they are doing this to dogs, as well as ducks and geese at the nearby park. They also claimed that they were told this by “rangers and police”.
While there has been no evidence to substantiate these anti-immigrant claims, a photo has been circulating online of a man in Columbus, Ohio carrying a dead goose. The man who took the photo in late July says he regrets having done so because it’s being “weaponized to use against immigrants”. He said he took the photo because it was not “something you see every day.”
"I wish I never took it, for sure. And I hate that the picture that I took is being weaponized to use against immigrants, or really, any other group. They always have to have somebody to use as a weapon. Some group to be the bad guy," the anonymous photographer told an Ohio news outlet.
“Then all of (these claims) supposedly they're going and killing all of the wildlife and whatever. That's ridiculous. But people see things that are spread and have no idea what the truth is, but they spread it like it's the truth. And I feel like the only person that knows what really happened to the goose is the guy that had the goose,” he added.
A caller in Springfield, Ohio did make a police report saying that he saw a group of “Haitian people, there were about four of ’em, they all had geese in their hand," while he was walking to work. He said two men and two women, each of whom had one goose in their hands, got in a truck and drove away. The call was placed on August 26, according to a police report that was reviewed by The Federalist.
That same month, a resident complained to city officials that Haitians are “running into trash cans” and “running into buildings,” “flipping cars in the middle of the street”. “ I don’t know how, y’all can be comfortable with this,” the resident told city officials. “They’re in the park, grabbing up ducks by the neck and cutting their heads off and eating them.”
But Alimemby Estimable, who is 19 and graduated from Springfield High School, says he hasn't seen evidence to back up these rumors.
"I've been seeing a lot of people talking about a lot of stuff that's not accurate. You know, saying, like, all Haitians are cutting ducks' necks and eating them at the park and like, they're running into trash cans and homes and stuff. I ain't never seen a Haitian do that before. I'm just keep it real, because I'm a Haitian myself," he told USA Today.
At the heart of the matter is this truth: between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian immigrants have settled into Springfield after being forced to flee from gang violence which erupted in Haiti last year. The Biden administration has allowed this surge of migrants under a humanitarian parole program.
The surging violence there is, of course, the result of corrupt leadership and a weakened democratic institution that the US has supported. And even since Haiti became independent in 1804, the US has consistently meddled in Haitian politics to form it to its own liking.