As Trump demonizes immigrants, two targeted communities fear what’s next

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 Haitiansin 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 alarmin 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 ata 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.

Tensions erupted in August when a Haitian driver without a valid licensehit 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 workedas 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.

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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 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.

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