Anti-immigrant lies and rhetoric spewed by Donald Trump and his party have caused real and terrifying results. On Thursday, several city, county, and school buildings in Springfield, Ohio, were targeted by a bomb threat. On Friday, a Springfield middle school was closed and two elementary schools were evacuated.
ABC News originally reported that there was no direct connection made between the threats and the GOP’s repeated racist lies about Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets. Additionally, ABC reported it was not “immediately clear if Friday’s evacuations were from a new threat or linked to bomb threats sent via email Thursday morning.”
But in an interview with The Washington Post, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said that Thursday’s bomb threat “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Trump erroneously claimed, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” This lie has also been pushed by his running mate Sen. JD Vance a number of times. And Trump continued to perpetuate the lie, adding geese this time, in a campaign rally Thursday in Arizona.
The Haitian Times reported that some of Springfield’s Haitian community has felt so threatened during this barrage of right-wing hate-propaganda that they chose to keep their children home from school following the debate. “We’re all victims this morning,” one woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told the outlet. “They’re attacking us in every way.”
The same kind of racist rhetoric has also besieged Venezuelan immigrants in Colorado. Trump has repeatedly pushed bullshit crime numbers (which he did once again during the debate), targeting Venezuelan communities in the Centennial State as filled with “gangs,” and saying they were “taking over” Colorado cities.
Even after the story and the crime numbers have been debunked, people like Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller continue unabashedly, with more vitriol than ever, to push racist lies. Those lies have consequences.
Aurora resident Carlos Ordosgoitti, whose building was the target of the fake gang story, told NBC News’ Denver affiliate KUSA, “Right now, I am scared because of what’s been created and all the xenophobia hate has increased towards us,” adding, “I’m really scared to be outside past 7 or 8 p.m. because you never know who can drive by or come around to try to harm us.”
The issue was compounded by local conservatives jumping on the racist bandwagon without any evidence to support their anti-immigrant position. Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky went so far as to call the lack of evidence a “cover up,” before recently walking back her statements.
Trump has also parroted purveyor of intolerance and domestic terrorism Libs of TikTok, who had pushed another completely fabricated story that a Venezuelan gang had taken control of an entire building, this time in Chicago. That story was amplified by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who pushed it to his followers across his social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
And all this amplification by politicians is continuing to fan the flames. In an interview with Fox28, Springfield Mayor Rue said “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
The father of an Ohio child that was accidentally killed last year when a Haitian immigrant hit the boy’s school bus, made a public statement condemning conservatives’ use of his son’s name in their ongoing hate-filled rhetoric against immigration. He called out not only Ohio conservatives but Colorado politicians and Trump using his son’s name as well.
“You know, I wish that my son, Aidan Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” Nathan Clark said before a Springfield City Commission. “If that guy killed my 11-year-old son the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.”
This is sadly par for the course during a time of fascistic and hateful rhetoric. We saw it with Asian hate crimes rising during COVID-19 pandemic, when Trump and others would frequently use derogatory terms for the coronavirus such as “Kung Flu,” and the “Chinese Virus.” We’ve seen it in the rise of antisemitism connected to the rise of MAGA extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theory as well as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
The consequences of the Republican Party’s need to target, isolate, and divide various groups of people, are that innocent, hardworking people suffer. At the same time, without any meaningful policies, the fear and economic uncertainty that the GOP repeats remains the same.
Trump said Tuesday during the debate that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “destroying” the residents’ “entire way of life.” That divisiveness, despite the fact that these Haitian Americans are part of that community, is the Trump way. And in a country made up almost entirely of immigrants, there’s always someone to blame.
