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Back in 2015, Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign at Trump Tower by branding immigrants from Mexico “rapists” and drug dealers, and nearly a decade later, his anti-immigration views have only gotten stronger.
In recent weeks, he and running mate JD Vance have been spreading unfounded, often racist claims about Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, part of a larger false narrative about an unprecedented “migrant crime” wave in the U.S. which is not actually occurring, which they allege is a consequence of Kamala Harris’s time in a “border czar” role she never actually had.
Trump and Vance may not be telling the whole truth, or much of it at all, but the comments are revealing nonetheless. They’re a signal of what a Trump-Vance presidency might look like, where the candidates have promised an unprecedented and “bloody” crackdown on migrants inside the U.S.
Most recently, Vance has joined in on an unfounded, racist rumor that migrants from Haiti are abducting and eating pets in his home state of Ohio.
“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote on X on Monday.
“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
The claim appears to have its roots in a post from a Springfield-based Facebook group, later parroted by far-right activists and neo-Nazis online before it reached Vance and other prominent Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz.
The Springfield police said on Monday they’d received no reports of pets being stolen or eaten, though Vance’s office insisted to The Independent that the senator has been receiving a “high volume of calls and emails” from “concerned citizens” about such claims.
“I think it’s sad that some people are using this as an opportunity to spread hate or spread fear,” Jason Via, Springfield’s deputy director of public safety and operations, said of the situation earlier this year. “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.”
Moreover, many of the up to 20,000 Haitians who’ve arrived in Springfield since the pandemic began are there legally under Temporary Protected Status, a program designed to protect migrants from countries undergoing crises like coups or national disasters. They have been credited with helping revive local manufacturing jobs.
The Trump ticket followed a similar playbook earlier this month, repeating highly contested claims that a Venezuelan street gang had taken over an apartment complex in the Denver suburb of Aurora.
“Take a look at Aurora in Colorado, where Venezuelans are taking over the whole town, they’re taking over buildings, the whole town,” Trump said at a recent Fox News town hall. “You saw it the other day they’re knocking down doors and occupying apartments of people.”
Here, the factual situation is a bit murkier, though there’s certainly not a citywide Venezuelan gang invasion underway.
Surveillance video of the apartment complex in question shows a group of armed men strolling the halls and entering an apartment, and a city council member and the mayor of Aurora have described buildings being taken over.
The Aurora police department and governor of Colorado, meanwhile, say this is untrue, and that violent crime has actually been declining in the city at the same time it received an influx of Venezuelan migrants.
In both cases, the claims from the Trump campaign may ignore key parts of the factual record but appear to have caused real damage on the ground.
Denise Williams, a former NAACP chapter president in Springfield, who has spoken out against the torrent of hate directed at Haitians in the area, told NPR she’s been bombarded with angry messages since Vance’s claims went public.
“I’m taking that as a pure threat,” she said.
Residents of the apartment complexes in Aurora under the microscope have also described a wave of violent, angry threats coming their way after their lives became the focus of the Republican conspiracy industrial complex.
Jefferson Medina, a Venezuelan immigrant who lives at one of the complexes, told Westworld last week that a group of men in a car with a “large gun” yelled “ugly things” as they drove through the area.
“I go to work at five in the morning, and I’m already afraid for my life that someone is going to do something — because I’m Venezuelan, they’re going to do something,” Moises Didenot, another Venezuelan migrant, told the outlet. “We’ve all already been threatened with a flier saying we’re all criminals. I’m afraid someone is going to do something out of hate.”
The anti-immigrant hysteria is part of the Trump campaign’s larger narrative that the U.S. is beset with a wave of “Biden migrant crime,” part of an “invasion” taking place at U.S. borders.
This is also not true.
Border-crossings did hit unprecedented levels at the U.S.-Mexico border in December, part of a record-breaking few years, but that hasn’t corresponded with a massive crime wave in the largely liberal-leaning cities where many have settled. Quite the opposite.
As a meta-analysis of criminal justice studies from the Brennan Center notes, the data does not support the claim that immigrants commit more crimes or are incarcerated at higher levels than U.S.-born people, nor does the data suggest undocumented migration and sanctuary city policies drive violent crime.
Those trends hold true even in cities to which Republican states like Texas have explicitly rerouted border-crossers, like Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York, and Los Angeles, according to an NBC News review of crime data available through 2024.
But if Donald Trump’s political rise has proven anything, it’s that the hard facts aren’t particularly important to his brand of power.
His numerous false claims about the 2020 election, none of which have secured meaningful victory in the courts, haven’t stopped the former president from retaining the support of nearly half of voters.
And it seems more Americans are coming around to Trump’s point of view on immigrants.
According to Gallup polling, between 2021 and July of 2024, the percentage of Americans who think immigration should be decreased shot up from 31 to 55 percent, mirrored by a sharp drop during that same period in those who think immigration should increase.
His first term in office coincided with a string of chaotic and highly controversial comments and initiatives — a travel ban from largely Muslim countries; family separation that divided, in some cases permanently, children from their parents, including U.S. citizens; reported comments calling Haiti and other African nations “sh**hole countries”; and a pandemic-era border shutdown.
As the last few weeks indicate, he was only just getting started.
