Sunday, September 15, 2024
Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up | Ohio | The Guardian
Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up
"Springfield’s immigrant community was targeted by far-right extremists months before Trump shared racist rumors
While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed.
He got a text from a friend telling him to turn on the debate. When he saw the headlines about what the former president and Republican nominee in November’s election had said, he was in total shock.
“This was a false claim. I couldn’t believe that such a high official could make such a claim,” Salomon said.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance, Elon Musk and prominent Ohio Republicans had already spread the false rumors, lying about how Haitian immigrants had been killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, a blue-collar town of 60,000 people in western Ohio. But the rumors, leaving Salomon and other Haitians in fear of being targeted for violence and discrimination, didn’t start with them.
They were initially spread online in August on social platforms used by far-right extremists and by Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group.
Springfield officials and police say they have received no credible reports of pets being harmed by members of the immigrant community, instead suggesting the story may have originated in Canton, Ohio, where an American woman with no known connection to Haiti was arrested in August for allegedly stomping a cat to death and eating the animal.
But that hasn’t prevented Republican party politicians from scapegoating Springfield’s 15,000 Haitian immigrants as Trump and others attempt to propel immigration to the center of their fall political campaigns. In addition to Tuesday’s debate, Trump held a news conference Friday in which he rambled without evidence about how Haitians had descended on Springfield “and destroyed the place”.
When Haitian immigrants began trickling into Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories in 2017, some thought the new residents could help the city regain its former vigor as a once-thriving manufacturing hub. Once home to major agricultural machinery companies in the mid-20th century, Springfield has lost a quarter of its population since the 1960s.
“They came to us for one reason: they were looking for ways to find out how to work,” Casey Rollins, executive director of the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Springfield chapter, said of those who came to the Ohio city from Haiti.
“So we got together immigration lawyers and interpreters to figure out how to help them work. We are getting them online and getting them to apply [for work permits]. We wanted workers here [in Springfield] – they want to work.”
Haitians and immigrants from Central American countries have been in high demand at Springfield’s Dole Fresh Vegetables – where they’ve been hired to clean and package produce – and at automotive machining plants whose owners were desperate for workers due to a labor shortage in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
New Caribbean restaurants and food trucks have opened across south Springfield where once abandoned neighborhoods are now bustling with residents. A popular Haitian radio station has been broadcasting for several years. And every May, thousands turn out for Haitian Flag Day that’s celebrated at a local park.
But the glut of new arrivals has also stretched hospitals and schools in the area, angering many locals who resented their presence. The outrage reached a crescendo last August, when an 11-year-old boy was thrown from a school bus and killed after its driver swerved to avoid an oncoming car driven by a Haitian immigrant who didn’t have an Ohio driver’s license.
The child’s death fueled anger and racism on Facebook and at Springfield city commission meetings, where public comments about immigration have often run for more than an hour. Locals upset by the growing immigrant community wondered if they were being taken over – if Springfield had become ground zero for the baseless “great replacement theory”.
Soon, rightwing extremists seized on Springfield’s unrest.
Armed neo-Nazi members of Blood Tribe – a hardcore white supremacist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League – flew flags bearing swastikas and marched through a prominent downtown street while a jazz and blues festival was taking place nearby in August.
One witness to the march, who declined to be interviewed by the Guardian due to fearing for their family’s safety after being doxed by rightwing extremists online, reported that members of the group pointed guns at cars and told people to “go the fuck back to Africa”.
A Springfield police representative, however, appeared to downplay the scene, telling local media that the hate group’s march was “just a little peaceful protest”.
Several days later, a leading member of Blood Tribe who identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, but whose real name is Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield city commission meeting.
“I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late,” Berentz told Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue. “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
Berentz was promptly kicked out for espousing threatening language. Nonetheless, on Thursday morning, a bomb threat prompted Springfield’s city hall, a school and other government offices to be evacuated.
The same group has marched in South Dakota and Tennessee this year.
Last year, having turned up to protest a drag story time event in Wadsworth, Ohio, where white supremacists gave Nazi salutes and shouted “Sieg heil”, the organization allegedly set up a chapter in the state. Last year, Blood Tribe members were driven out of Maine having attempted to set up a compound and Nazi training camp in the rural north-eastern part of the state.
“Blood Tribe celebrated Donald Trump bringing up the [immigrants killing cats] lie during the debate,” said Maria Bruno of Ohioans Against Extremism, a non-profit founded last month in part due to a rising presence of extremists in Ohio. “They are thrilled that there are politicians willing to echo their talking points.”
JD Vance has regularly claimed that “illegal immigrants” are “generally causing chaos all across Springfield” on the campaign trail in recent weeks. Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, said he plans to direct his office to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”.
However, the vast majority of Haitians in Springfield are in the US legally through a temporary protected status (TPS) that’s been allocated to them due to the violence and unrest in their home country. Citizens of 16 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar, are eligible for TPS. It is not a pathway to US citizenship and is valid for only 18 months, at which point it must be renewed by the federal homeland security department for a status holder to remain in the country legally.
“They are entrepreneurs, they want to innovate,” Rollins said of Haitian people in Springfield. “They just work excessively once they are eligible.”
But many Haitians have been targeted in Springfield.
In December, a Springfield man was sentenced to 20 years in federal jail for hate crimes after attacking eight Haitians earlier in 2023. Last year, the local Haitian church was broken into and damaged twice. Longtime Black residents of Springfield have reported being verbally abused when walking on the city’s streets, having been confused with members of the Haitian community.
The effect is plainly obvious.
“Normally, when I drive through south Springfield, where a lot of Haitians live, you see people walking on the streets, at the Haitian markets and restaurants,” Salomon said.
“For the past few days, I have seen far fewer people.”
Rollins said she has received threats that the St Vincent de Paul branch would be destroyed for its support of Haitians.
“People are messaging me, telling me that I’ve destroyed Springfield,” she said. “We’re just trying to help people.”
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Harris regains small poll lead post-debate as US election inches closer | US elections 2024 | The Guardian
"
Harris regains small poll lead post-debate as US election inches closer
Kamala Harris has re-established a crucial polling advantage over Donald Trump following this week’s debate, which a clear majority of voters believe she won, according to a range of surveys.
The latest Guardian polling trends tracker shows the US vice-president regaining a small lead over the Republican nominee since Tuesday’s encounter in Philadelphia, a shift from surveys at the start of the week when the pair were essentially tied.
The movement is supported by individual polls, some of which show Harris with a bigger lead than the 0.9% advantage displayed in the Guardian tracker.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll, the first to be conducted since the debate, had Harris ahead by five points, 47 to 42%, a 1-point rise on the lead recorded in the week after last month’s Democratic national convention.
A separate Morning Consult survey published on Thursday showed a similar lead, 50 to 45%, up from the three- to four-point advantage Harris was registering before the debate. Tellingly, the poll reflected a loss of support for Trump, perhaps supporting some pollsters’ argument that his erratic performance in Tuesday’s encounter – which was watched by 67.1 million viewers – damaged his credibility.
Two other polls by YouGov and Leger give Harris a four- and three-point lead respectively. Generally, the post-debate polls present a rosier outlook for the vice-president than surveys beforehand, which suggested that the surge in popularity she experienced after replacing Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee had stalled, allowing Trump to draw close to even in national polls, and even edge ahead in one New York Times/Siena survey.
All available indicators suggest that the turnaround has been triggered by the events of the debate, where Harris was broadly seen as cutting a calm, controlled figure while getting under the skin of Trump – who repeatedly veered off policy message to go on wild tangents about immigrants and crowd sizes at his rallies.
While so far declining Harris’s challenge of a second debate, the former president nevertheless claims that he won the exchange.
Survey respondents beg to differ. The Reuters/Ipsos polls showed 53% who had heard something about the encounter believed that Harris had come out on top, as opposed to 24% thinking Trump had prevailed. The Morning Consult poll showed a similar margin, 55-25%, in favour of thinking Harris had won.
That is broadly in line with three earlier post-debate polls – conducted by CNN, YouGov and CNN – which gave Harris an average debate-winning margin of 23%.
“She definitely got a bump – and if those polls are accurate, a little more of a bump than I thought,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster who believes key moments in some debates had small but decisive impacts on the outcomes of past presidential elections.
“Clearly Kamala Harris won the debate. There are enough polls out to show that and other observers beyond the polls also believe that she won. I think, more importantly, Trump lost the debate. He lost a lot of credibility, in addition to having lost the debate.”
The burning question, however, is whether one lost debate translates into a lost election.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and strategist who forecast in advance of the debate that its winner would prevail in November, suggested that the sour nature of Trump’s showing had sealed his electoral fate.
“It was a pretty negative performance. Pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous and I think that this will cost him, yes,” he told the interviewer Piers Morgan. “I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”
Although eight weeks separate Tuesday’s debate from election day on 5 November, the wafer-thin polling margins – particularly in key battleground states – mean the ripples emanating from Trump’s multiple miscues are likely to have an outsize effect, Luntz argued.
“There are very few undecided voters left,” he said. “It’s about 5% of the vote – and they only matter in seven states. And those states are too close to call. So essentially we are looking at less than 1% of America. But they heard nothing from Trump to give them a sense of anything that would be different going forward.”
Zogby, by contrast, said it was “too early to tell” the debate’s electoral impact and identified weaknesses in Harris’s performance that may return to haunt her.
“She lost some points on substance,” he said. “Right from the very beginning [when she was asked] can you tell the American people that they’re better off than they were three and a half years ago … she jumped right into the future. That’s going to dog her because three-quarters of the US voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction – and the blame goes to the party on top and the president on top. She owns the administration’s successes, but she also owns inflation and the economy.
“So I will say advantage to her on presentation and being cool, but there was no knockout blow.”
One additional piece of fallout from Tuesday’s debate might tilt the balance in Harris’s direction – the intervention of Taylor Swift.
The singer endorsed Harris immediately after the event, a move that prompted about 400,000 people to visit a voter registration link she posted on her Instagram, which has 284 million followers.
A late young voter registration surge favouring the Democrats could significantly affect the electoral role played by the age 18-29 voter demographic, among which Harris’s current 15% lead over Trump compares unfavourably with the 28% advantage Biden held in his 2020 election victory.
In a segment on CNN, Harry Enten, the network’s polling specialist, illustrated a trend towards Republican registration among voters under 30 in battleground states that are key to winning the White House.
In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two fiercely contested swing states, the GOP had drastically whittled back the Democrats’ lead among young voters of four years ago, thanks to a superior registration drive, he said, the effect of which Harris could only hope Swift’s endorsement could reverse.
“Kamala Harris will absolutely welcome in the support of Taylor Swift if she can move young voters at all,” Enten said. “The bottom line is [Harris] is not doing as well among young voters as you might expect the Democrat to necessarily be doing, based upon history.”
Harris regains small poll lead post-debate as US election inches closer | US elections 2024 | The GuardianTrump’s fiery rhetoric has Haitians and other immigrants on edge - The Washington Post
As Trump demonizes immigrants, two targeted communities fear what’s next
(Trump, three generations of grim inals. His grandfather ran a brothel in Toronto, he, a criminal should never have been allowed to immigrate to the US. Trump's father was arrested in a KKK rally and Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies. He should be in jail, not running for President.)
"Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and Venezuelans in Aurora, Colo., are in the harsh spotlight of the former president’s false claims and threats of deportation.
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The Haitian eatery cooks were preparing for Thursday’s lunch rush when the phone rang.
“Got any cats or dogs?” a mocking voice asked.
Romane Pierre, the 41-year-old manager of Rose Goute Creole, didn’t want to alarm his staff. They were already nervous. During the presidential debate barely 36 hours earlier, Republican nominee Donald Trump had targeted Haitians in Springfield, falsely accusing them of “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Pierre summoned his customer-service politeness.
“No,” he replied, “but we have chicken and pork.”
A crackpot call was a minor disruption compared with that morning’s bomb threat on city hall, conveyed in a message the mayor described as “hateful” toward immigrants. By Friday, two elementary schools in this southwestern Ohio city had gone into lockdown and evacuated their students. Pierre’s team, who usually kept the restaurant open late, decided to close before dark.
“Everyone’s scared,” he said, keeping an eye on the glass entrance.
The incendiary claims about immigrants that Trump echoed to millions of Americans have turned a dangerous spotlight on those in the cities he keeps name-checking: Springfield and Aurora, Colo., a Denver suburb where he has repeatedly asserted Venezuelan criminals are “taking over.”
“We’re going to get these people out,” he said in a news conference Friday, intensifying his attack and promising to stage “the largest deportation in the history of our country” if reelected.
Trump’s words don’t reflect their reality, more than a dozen immigrants said in interviews this week. But his rhetoric, which right-wing news sources and social media have greatly amplified, triggered alarm in places grappling with culture clashes.
In Springfield, where the Haitian population has soared since 2020, some from the Caribbean nation have been keeping their children home from school, community organizers say, fearing bullying or worse. Others have reported harassment on the street, in their cars and at stores.
In Aurora, a large and proudly diverse city where thousands of Venezuelans began arriving in 2022, numerous migrants said they have been told their nationality makes them ineligible for jobs or housing. Residents of buildings that some officials have alleged are under gang control said the false rumors have led to threats and even drawn armed groups to the properties — claiming to offer protection, vigilante-style.
And in both cities, despite officials challenging or debunking Trump’s accusations and calling for more levelheaded dialogue, the former president has doubled down.
“I am angry about Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado,” he said Thursday at a rally in Arizona, “and illegal Haitian migrants taking over a beautiful place ... Springfield, Ohio.”
The Haitians in Springfield are here legally, the city manager has explained at public meetings. According to police, there is no evidence any had stolen any cat, dog or other pet or contributed disproportionately to crime.
Rather, business leaders explain, they are filling jobs that would otherwise sit open, propelling growth after a painful chapter of economic decline.
But the population boom, by all accounts, has strained resources. Housing is costlier. Traffic has picked up. Classrooms are packed. Wait times are longer at doctors’ offices.
Over the last quarter-century, the once-prosperous manufacturing hub hollowed out to nearly 60,000 residents as factories shuttered. When a rebound finally began, with new plants and warehouses opening, the burst of blue-collar roles quickly attracted immigrants to the overwhelmingly White area. Since the pandemic, according to city estimates, roughly 20,000 Haitians have arrived.
Tensions erupted in August when a Haitian driver without a valid license hit a school bus that then tipped over, killing an 11-year-old boy and injuring 23 other children. Springfield found itself in the center of a media storm, setting the stage for the flood of cat memes on Lindsay Aimé's iPhone screen.
Aimé, a 34-year-old warehouse interpreter fluent in French and Haitian Creole, had settled in Springfield for a job he hoped would better support his family. Back home, he’d worked as a lawyer. Then gunmen assassinated Haiti’s president in 2021, and gangs seized control of most of the country, destroying his livelihood.
Every morning, he checks his phone to make sure his 12-year-old son, who still lives on the island with an aunt, was safe. This week, the boy wanted to know: What was going on in Ohio?
“Are people eating cats there?” he texted. “Yuck!”
Absolutely not, Aimé replied. He could barely handle an American serving of Ranch dressing. The two laughed it off. He didn’t want his son to worry about him.
About 1,200 miles west in Aurora, the mayor and a city council member, both Republicans, had just released a joint statement aiming to “clear the record” surrounding the feverish reports about the local presence of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
The gang operates in the area, they acknowledged, and police had identified and arrested eight members. Tren de Aragua and other criminal actors had “significantly affected” specific apartment complexes. But the notion that Aurora or those buildings had been “taken over” by the gang were “not true,” the statement said.
Aurora would be difficult to take over. With a population of nearly 400,000, it is larger than Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. It contains gritty urban corridors, grassy public parks and tony residential neighborhoods. Public school students speak more than 160 languages.
The area where the apartments in question are located, off of busy Colfax Avenue, has struggled with crime for years, officials and community leaders say. And the buildings, all owned by a company Mayor Mike Coffman has called “out-of-state slumlords,” have not escaped that.
Still, allegations of gang takeover “came out of left field,” said Aurora City Council member Crystal Murillo (D), whose ward includes the apartment complexes.
The scenario drew national headlines after a tenant’s video from one of the complexes, showing armed men entering a unit, went viral. The woman told CBS News that she witnessed weapons and shootouts but got no help from police. Neighbors soon held a news conference to say the gang concerns were overblown. The real problem, they insisted, was neglect from management.
In her tidy apartment on Thursday, one Venezuelan complained that people without leases occupy apartments, hold loud parties and fight with little consequence. But Yusemelis — who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of being targeted amid the Trump-fueled furor — was baffled by the suggestion that gang members were collecting rent.
The one-bedroom she shares with her husband and teen daughter costs $1,200 a month. They pay on time despite management never fixing their two broken stove burners, putting doors on the kitchen cabinets or patching the leak from the apartment above.
“In my home, everything is very clean. But there are lots of rats,” said Yusmelis, 40, sitting at a table set neatly with gold floral place mats.
She feels far safer in Aurora than in Venezuela, though the recent polemics had brought strange and frightening developments.
She pulled out her phone to show a video taken days before in the courtyard outside her window. In it, multiple men in black face masks, one carrying a long gun, speak in Spanish that she described as Mexican-accented. They proclaim they are there to protect residents from Venezuelan gangs.
“I ran inside with my daughter,” Yusmelis said. “I thought they were going to fire on us.”
In the last few weeks, people have driven by taking video of the complex and putting up xenophobic signs, said Nate Kassa, a housing advocate who has helped tenants advocate for better conditions since well before the gang uproar.
One tenant who posted her phone number on a window sign advertising homemade Venezuelan foods received a profanity-laced text message. It warned that “colorado veterans are building a militia with more fire power then you guys could ever imagine.”
Fifteen minutes away at another apartment complex swept up in the firestorm, residents said a local crew of Americans had recently shown up in search of Tren de Aragua. When they didn’t find anything, a woman recounted, “they sprayed graffiti and left.”
Sarami Marin sat Thursday in a neighbor’s apartment, where neither the heating nor the air conditioning work and the walls and ceiling are pocked with large holes. Even so, the 24-year-old Marin worried she would soon be looking for a new home. The city had closed another building managed by the same company, displacing many Venezuelans.
Marin could not lose more. She had recently been dismissed from her hotel housekeeping job. She asked her bosses if she did something wrong. No, she was told; it was because of “the situation with Venezuelans.”
“We suffered so much to come here,” she said. “Now, because of racism and xenophobia, we can’t even find work.”
On Thursday, a couple hours after Trump had ramped up his fiction about the Haitians in Springfield abducting pets, Viles Dorsainvil wondered if a PowerPoint presentation might help.
Perched on a floral chair at his friend’s apartment, the 38-year-old president of the Haitian Community Help & Support Center read aloud from a slide titled “Breakfast.”
“Breakfast in Haiti begins with ‘akasun,’ a thick, corn-based porridge,” he recited.
Dorsainvil wanted everyone to know: Haitians here don’t eat dogs or cats. They embrace different customs, but they aren’t “savage” — another label Trump had tossed out.
He’d assembled this presentation months before the presidential debate, aiming to educate others in Springfield about who the immigrants they truly were. Unfortunately, the food section had taken on new importance.
Amid the torrent of cat memes, another clip was blazing across the internet — one featuring a local factory owner who described his Haitian employees this way: “They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. They’ll achieve their numbers. They are here to work.”
Dorsainvil hoped more Americans would see that.
Yes, they were good employees. No, they weren’t into drugs. If anything, Prestige Beer — the Haitian lager — was their biggest vice.
The Haitians in Springfield, Dorsainvil said, are Republicans and Democrats. Some own dogs. Some own cats. Many have bought and restored crumbling houses. Many frequent Dunkin’ and Chipotle. Many cram into church on Sunday mornings.
Many are texting him questions like “should we move?” and “are we safe?”
Brulliard reported from Aurora."
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