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JD Vance has suggested that he will continue to call Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio “illegal” aliens despite knowing that they’re here legally.
During a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina on Wednesday, Vance was asked by Politico what would happen to migrants in the country under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, such as many of those in Springfield, during a possible second Trump administration. The Republican vice presidential nominee was also asked how the administration would go about deporting migrants in the country legally.
“The media loves to say that the Haitian migrants hundreds of thousands of them, by the way, 20,000 in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of them all across the country, they are here legally,” Vance said. “And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs, mass parole and temporary protective status ... to wave a wand and to say, ‘We're not going to deport those people here.’”
He added: “Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I'm still going to call them an illegal alien. And illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”
Many of the Haitian migrants currently in the US came to the country under the Biden administration’s TPS and Humanitarian parole program, which allows migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela to come to the US legally if they have a sponsor and meet certain requirements. Some who are eligible can wait in the country as their permanent immigration status is ironed out.
The city of Springfield states on its website that “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Haiti is designated by the Secretary of Homeland Security for TPS. Current TPS is granted through February 3, 2026.”
Several reports have now confirmed that an aide to Vance was told by a Springfield official previously this month that the claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating domestic pets were baseless but that former President Donald Trump’s running mate went ahead and spread the claims anyway, according to the Wall Street Journal and ABC News. On September 9, city manager Bryan Heck told a Vance staffer in a call that the “claims were baseless.”
But Vance chose not to remove a post on X that he shared that very same morning claiming that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
The following day, Trump made the same claim during the presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Vance campaign handed The Journal a police report to try to back up their claims, but the report turned out to have been based on a mistake. The woman who filed the report, Anna Kilgore, had lost her cat and believed her Haitian neighbors may be to blame. But her cat came back home unscathed several days later, and Kilgore apologized to her neighbors. She told ABC News that she believed that her neighbors could have been behind her cat’s disappearance because of rumors being spread on Facebook and TikTok.
“I wish I could take it all back,” she told ABC News.
Appearing on CNN over the weekend, Vance said he had to “create stories” to make the US media focus on immigration.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast,” he said.
He then claimed that the rumors come “from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
“I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies. Her policies did that,” he added on Sunday.
