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False claims about people eating cats aren’t the only disinformation coming out of Springfield. Oliveira’s video suggests that the migrants in Springfield are taking public benefits that would otherwise go to Americans, while politicians, including Vance, have claimed Haitians recently crossed the border. But the Dayton Daily News reports that most of the Haitians in Springfield are in the US under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), an immigration designation that lets nationals from certain countries live and work in the US but does not provide a pathway to citizenship. TPS is only available for people already in the United States; people can’t apply for it after crossing the border. Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010, and President Joe Biden reissued its TPS status in 2021, meaning no one who arrived after then is eligible for it. And people with TPS aren’t eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or most other forms of public assistance.

The most overt misinformation coming out of Springfield — the racist rumor about migrants eating pets — obscures the smaller, more insidious lies being spread about the community.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24243...tion-trump

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Leading up to Tuesday’s debate, Trump shared on social media altered images of himself protecting various pets, in what appeared to be a reference to the Springfield claim.

The memes took on a more menacing look in social media platforms used by far-right extremists such as the Proud Boys and armed groups.

Seemingly overnight, the same forums that days ago were preoccupied with an imagined Venezuelan takeover of Colorado shifted to fearmongering about Haitians in Ohio. In these forums, the racism is overt, such as memes of Trump in a suit carrying kittens to safety while being pursued by a mob of shirtless Black men. Or jokes about calling the authorities when French-speaking Black people move into the neighborhood.

Haitians invariably were shown in tropes portraying them as dangerous savages; images of guns and other weapons are sometimes presented as “the answer” to a refugee “problem.” Hate trackers say they’re concerned about the risk of such dehumanizing language and imagery fueling violence toward Black people and immigrants. Mass shooters in El Paso and Buffalo are among several far-right attackers who have cited racist, xenophobic rhetoric as a justification for bloodshed.

Kathleen Belew, a historian of U.S. white-supremacist movements, wrote on X on Tuesday that such demonization campaigns are an old tactic that should be taken seriously. The debunked claims about Haitian refugees aren’t “just nonsense,” Belew warned: “The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they’re doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time.”

Anatomy of a racist smear: How false claims of pet-eating immigrants caught on

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‘A very old political trope’: the racist US history behind Trump’s Haitian pet eater claim

People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new for their community, and experts say the “dog eater” trope is a fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of color, particularly those of Asian descent.

“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is low-hanging fruit to rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Demonizing immigrants through falsehoods about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published trading cards that featured cartoonish sketches of Chinese men eating rats, and smeared his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “China’s presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.

“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize Chinese male immigrants and show them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry but also a “civilization threat”, she added, as one rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America”.

An urban legend alleging that Chinese restaurants serve dog meat, cat meat or rats dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China is “not what it ought to be”, then says, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie”.

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America’s long history of anti-Haitian racism, explained

Attacks on Haitian immigrants tap into the longstanding US framing of Haiti as a threat.

“Racism and xenophobia against Haitians among white Americans can be traced all the way back to the Haitian Revolution when Haitians … [overthrew] the system of slavery and [established] the world’s first Black republic,” Carl Lindskoog, the author of a book on the US’s detention of Haitian immigrants, told Vox. “Since then, Haitians have been seen by many white Americans as a threat to white rule and have been treated as such.”

In 1804, Haitians successfully overthrew colonial rule and enslavement by France. Concerned that Haitians’ victory would inspire enslaved people in America to pursue a similar revolution, the US did not recognize Haiti’s independence for nearly six decades.

Following the revolution, France used military force to demand financial restitution for loss of the colony, forcing Haiti to borrow money to cover its demands. The US and France provided those loans — and used them to continue exerting control over Haiti’s finances for years. In total, a New York Times investigation found that reparations to France cost Haiti’s economy $21 billion and directly contributed to poverty and financial problems that still plague the country to this day.

The US also occupied Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934, more than a century after its successful revolution, under the flimsy justification that it was there to ensure political stability following the assassination of multiple Haitian presidents. In reality, it mounted the occupation to prevent France or Germany from gaining ground in the region, which was viewed as strategically valuable. During this time, the US set up a system of forced labor, and sold Haitian land to American corporations.

The takeover also sent a demeaning message: that Haiti wasn’t capable of handling its own affairs.

“A lot of scholars have talked about … rhetoric that’s used to justify invasion around civilizing a society,” says Jamella Gow, a sociologist at Bowdoin University. “This notion of Haitians as backwards, criminal and dangerous started way back then.” The association of Haiti with voodoo practices, something self-help author Marianne Williamson, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020 and 2024, evoked this week, is another tactic that’s been used to suggest that they’re a “mysterious … migrant other,” says Gow.

In the decades since, the US’s treatment of Haitian immigrants has built on and reinforced these ideas. That was evident in the 1970s, when a wave of Haitian migrants sought asylum in the US as they tried to escape political persecution from US-backed dictator Jean Claude Duvalier. Many of these arrivals were detained and denied asylum, though they met the qualifications for it.

These practices set a precedent for the detention of asylum-seekers, a punitive approach the US still employs now. In a 1980 Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti case, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the US government had singled Haitians out and practiced blatant racism in its immigration policies. Despite this decision, then-President Jimmy Carter and his successors managed to find loopholes to keep up this approach. In the years that followed, while a surge of Cuban and Haitian migrants came to the US around the same time, Haitian people were far more likely to stay in detention compared to their Cuban counterparts.

The stigmatization of Haitian immigrants continued, too, in subsequent decades, including efforts to associate Haitians with illnesses, such as HIV. In the early 1980s, when no scientific name had been given to HIV/AIDS, the press and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed it the 4H disease — which stood for “Haitians, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Heroin users,” in part because some of the early cases of the illness included Haitian people.

A fear of HIV — and the framing of Haitian immigrants as carriers of disease — was among the reasons that led the US to detain Haitian asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay during the 1990s. (Thousands were detained and deported, while some who were HIV-positive were threatened with indefinite detention.) That’s part of a long history of the US government deeming immigrants health hazards in order to stymie their entry into the country — a practice that was again embraced during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations used a federal authority known as Title 42 to turn away migrants due to public health concerns during and following pandemic. Haitians were one of the largest groups turned away at the southern border on these grounds, Lindsvoog said.

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How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump

As far back as May 2023, Aurora officials had been trying to force an out-of-state landlord to fix up three blighted apartment complexes in the downtrodden East Colfax Corridor, which connects the cities of Denver and Aurora.

In July 2024, the landlord, CBZ Management, which says it is based in Colorado and Brooklyn, offered a new argument for why it couldn’t repair the buildings: Venezuelan gangs had taken over, and the property managers had been forced to flee.

[Republican Mayor Mike Coffman] and a Republican City Council member, Danielle Jurinsky, quickly repeated CBZ’s unverified claim in interviews.

“We have areas in our city, unfortunately, that have been taken, and we have to take back,” Mr. Coffman told a local talk radio host on July 31.

On Aug, 5, a public relations agent, Sara Lattman, hired by CBZ, pitched a “tip” to the local Fox television network affiliate in Denver.

“An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” she wrote on Fox 31’s tip line, according to an email obtained by The Times. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”

But it was a viral video that began circulating in late August that shows armed men in the hallway of one of the complexes that ultimately caught Mr. Trump’s attention. The incident was reported as a connection to gang violence, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though documentation was scarce.

On Tuesday, the Aurora Police Department announced it had arrested 10 members of Tren de Aragua on charges of ”felony menacing,” attempted first-degree murder, assault, child abuse, domestic abuse and others. But Todd Chamberlain, Aurora’s new police chief, could not say whether any of those men were among those seen in the video, or whether any in the video had actually done anything criminal.

Still, the clip, taken by a resident and played on endless loops on Fox News Channel and the website of The New York Post, metastasized into grandiose stories of whole buildings, whole sections of town and, in Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole city of Aurora being taken over by migrants carrying weapons of war.

”And getting them out will be a bloody story,” Mr. Trump said of Aurora at a rally in Mosinee, Wis., last Saturday, adding that it was “not going to be easy, but we’ll do it.”

Mr. Coffman and Ms. Jurinsky have both since backtracked.

“The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true,” they wrote in a joint statement released Wednesday that appeared aimed at pushing back on Mr. Trump’s debate comments.