Using dehumanizing language to describe immigrants is nothing new for former President Donald Trump or vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Accusations of immigrants being criminals, being rapists or poisoning the blood of the nation have become common currency. But this week, the rhetoric seemed to hit a new low: the allegation that immigrants eat pets.
Vance, who represents Ohio in the U.S. Senate, spread a debunked claim about Haitian migrants living in the city of Springfield, Ohio, on Monday, accusing them of abducting pets and eating them.
The claim, which local police say is baseless, was made by far-right activists, local Republicans and neo-Nazis before being picked up by Vance. A well-known advocate for the Haitian community says she received a wave of racist harassment in the aftermath of Vance’s post.
Vance made the claim as part of a political attack against Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. On the social media site X, Vance wrote, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” He was referring to a label Republicans have pinned on Harris, who was tasked by President Biden with working to examine the root causes of migration from Central America.
Springfield, a small city of around 60,000 people, has received 15,000 to 20,000 migrants in the past four years, many from Haiti, which has created tension as the city works to absorb so many newcomers in a short amount of time.
The city has often been cited by Vance and other Republicans as what they view as a cautionary tale of the economic woes caused by immigration.
Less than 30 minutes after Vance’s post, the Springfield News-Sun reported that local police said that incidents of pets being stolen or eaten were “not something that’s on our radar right now.” The paper said the unsubstantiated claim seems to have started with a post in a Springfield Facebook group that was widely shared across social media.
But on X, Republican politicians and far-right social media influencers continued to amplify the narrative. “Cat Lives Matter!” wrote Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., while Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., posted, “Protect America’s pets!”
Apparent AI-generated images of Trump with kittens and ducks soon followed on the social media site. The owner of X, Elon Musk, also amplified the story to his nearly 200 million followers, reposting an AI-generated image of Trump first posted by House Republicans and repeating the claim about pet-eating in a different post.
The Springfield News-Sun said that reports of pets being eaten might have been confused with an unrelated allegation of cat-eating in Canton, Ohio, about 175 miles away.
Before Vance, neo-Nazis helped spread the debunked claims
The now-refuted claim appears to have gotten its start online in early August, when a user on the far-right social platform Gab with the screen name “bri ory” commented on photos of members of the white supremacist neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marching through Springfield protesting Haitian migrants and carrying swastika flags. The commenter claimed that “once haitians swarm into a town animals start to disappear.”
Later in August, a resident named Anthony Harris claimed at a Springfield City Commission meeting that the migrants were eating ducks in the park. A member of the same neo-Nazi group also attended the meeting, and the group later echoed that claim on Gab. Days later, it appeared on X.
Haitian immigrants in Springfield have been the targets of rumors for some time, as NPR reported last month. Republican committee woman Glenda Bailey has become one of the loudest voices against Haitian migration, publicly accusing the community of having diseases, carrying out Voodoo rites and being involved in gangs.
She has also spoken at length about “great replacement theory,” the baseless belief that there is a movement to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. “Some of the Haitians are gang members,” she told NPR. “I’ve seen them. They have become the occupiers. What they’ve done is they’ve replaced the population in Springfield, Ohio.”
The Springfield Police Division told NPR in August that such claims were troubling.
“I think it’s sad that some people are using this as an opportunity to spread hate or spread fear,” said Jason Via, deputy director of public safety and operations. “We get these reports ‘the Haitians are killing ducks in a lot of our parks’ or ‘the Haitians are eating vegetables right out of the aisle at the grocery store.’ And we haven’t really seen any of that. It’s really frustrating. As a community, it’s not helpful as we try to move forward.”
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