Home City, USA

By Pooja Bhatia

Haitian migrants brought Springfield, Ohio back to life. Then came the Trump team with its xenophobic lies. In our new issue, Pooja Bhatia demonstrates what happens to the city—and people—on the path of a culture war.

THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, boosters of Springfield, Ohio, have chosen nicknames that suggest a welcoming, prosperous city. “Champion City” pays tribute to the nineteenth-century farm-implements company that made the Champion reaper and later became part of International Harvester, helping to seed an economic boom that lasted into the 1920s. “City of Roses” comes from the same era, when Springfield grew more roses than any other city. “Home City” alludes to the charitable homes for orphans and the elderly built by the turn of the twentieth century—casting Springfield as a kind of refuge.

But Home City became a cruel misnomer during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Springfield was targeted by Republicans and white nationalists who incited public hostility toward its growing community of Haitian immigrants. Having escaped violence and persecution in Haiti, many of the newcomers mistook Springfield for a safe haven. The inauguration of Donald Trump, who seems to harbor special animus toward Haitians, ended that. By April, when I visited the city, thousands of Haitian residents were lying low or in hiding or had fled, fearing the prospect of a state-sponsored purge. Mass deportations would come, they and others in town believed; the only question was when. Uncertainty became a terror unto itself.

I’d been following the city’s saga for a year before last September’s second televised presidential debate, when a heinous lie dripped from Trump’s lips and, by some awful alchemy, turned the city into a magnet for hate and moronity from all over the country. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” The lie became a meme, a TikTok craze, a canard celebrated by replacement-theory paranoiacs. On the ground in Springfield that month, the struggle was existential. Haitians kept their children home from school; some were attacked, some fled. A rash of bomb threats forced evacuations and closures of buildings all over town. Citizens who had publicly supported immigrants were singled out for hostile treatment. They faced death threats, harassment online and off, defamation, slander, doxing, and a type of swatting involving a gay dating app.

“The lie became a meme, a TikTok craze, a canard celebrated by replacement-theory paranoiacs.”

As president, Trump has continued to lie about Haitians in Springfield—almost every word he’s uttered about them is the opposite of the truth. He’s inflated their numbers, misrepresented their legal status (most are documented), and accused them of having “destroyed” a previously “idyllic” city. Local officials have tried to fight disinformation with facts, but that hasn’t worked. What national Republicans unleashed here was less like an infection than an autoimmune disease, the body politic attacking itself for reasons no one really understands. Facts seemed to make the inflammation hotter, more painful. “The greatest hardship we have faced in the past six months is the mischaracterization of our city,” Republican Mayor Rob Rue said in a statement after Trump again cited Springfield as an example of “migrant occupation” in an address before a joint session of Congress in March.

On one matter only, Springfielders could believe what Trump said, whether they saw it as a promise or a threat: that he was targeting their city for a mass deportation of its Haitian residents. Some fixated on August 3, when, barring a stay of Trump’s executive orders ending their Temporary Protected Status (TPS), many of Springfield’s Haitians would be subject to removal. Many had already received intimidating and false communiqués from the federal government ordering them to self-deport. Some residents told me they believed that Trump had plans for a mass deportation there this summer. A June 12 post by Trump, name-checking Springfield and claiming a “Historic Mandate” for mass deportations, triggered another wave of terror. “The fact that the president cannot keep our city out of his mouth means that I know he’s not forgotten us, and so I’m concerned what the outcome will be,” Rue said afterward. “We want to live in peace and freedom, and we do the best we can.”

I was nervous to visit. Springfield’s residents had been exploited, terrorized, and shamed, and many now faced the prospect of state-sponsored violence. And here I was, another journalist on the scene to examine their wounds, not to salve or soothe but to tell outsiders yet another story about them. I anticipated wary stares, pursed lips, and possibly even racism directed at me, a brown person on her own. Perhaps some of Trump’s lies had seeped into my consciousness, despite my defenses, because I imagined Springfield as a downtrodden place, an ugly, dangerous landscape full of loss and hate.

That’s not what I found.

Continue reading “Home City, USA,” an essay by Pooja Bhatia, on our site.

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