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 Haitians in 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 alarm in 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 at a 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.

But the population boom, by all accounts, has strained resources. Housing is costlier. Traffic has picked up. Classrooms are packed. Wait times are longer at doctors’ offices.

Over the last quarter-century, the once-prosperous manufacturing hub hollowed out to nearly 60,000 residents as factories shuttered. When a rebound finally began, with new plants and warehouses opening, the burst of blue-collar roles quickly attracted immigrants to the overwhelmingly White area. Since the pandemic, according to city estimates, roughly 20,000 Haitians have arrived.

Tensions erupted in August when a Haitian driver without a valid license hit 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 worked as 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.

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 of 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.

The scenario drew national headlines after a tenant’s video from one of the complexes, showing armed men entering a unit, went viral. The woman told CBS News that she witnessed weapons and shootouts but got no help from police. Neighbors soon held a news conference to say the gang concerns were overblown. The real problem, they insisted, was neglect from management.

In her tidy apartment on Thursday, one Venezuelan complained that people without leases occupy apartments, hold loud parties and fight with little consequence. But Yusemelis - who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of being targeted amid the Trump-fueled furor - was baffled by the suggestion that gang members were collecting rent.

The one-bedroom she shares with her husband and teen daughter costs $1,200 a month. They pay on time despite management never fixing their two broken stove burners, putting doors on the kitchen cabinets or patching the leak from the apartment above.

“In my home, everything is very clean. But there are lots of rats,” said Yusmelis, 40, sitting at a table set neatly with gold floral place mats.

She feels far safer in Aurora than in Venezuela, though the recent polemics had brought strange and frightening developments.

She pulled out her phone to show a video taken days before in the courtyard outside her window. In it, multiple men in black face masks, one carrying a long gun, speak in Spanish that she described as Mexican-accented. They proclaim they are there to protect residents from Venezuelan gangs.

“I ran inside with my daughter,” Yusmelis said. “I thought they were going to fire on us.”

In the last few weeks, people have driven by taking video of the complex and putting up xenophobic signs, said Nate Kassa, a housing advocate who has helped tenants advocate for better conditions since well before the gang uproar.

One tenant who posted her phone number on a window sign advertising homemade Venezuelan foods received a profanity-laced text message. It warned that “colorado veterans are building a militia with more fire power then you guys could ever imagine.”

Fifteen minutes away at another apartment complex swept up in the firestorm, residents said a local crew of Americans had recently shown up in search of Tren de Aragua. When they didn’t find anything, a woman recounted, “they sprayed graffiti and left.”

Sarami Marin sat Thursday in a neighbor’s apartment, where neither the heating nor the air conditioning work and the walls and ceiling are pocked with large holes. Even so, the 24-year-old Marin worried she would soon be looking for a new home. The city had closed another building managed by the same company, displacing many Venezuelans.

Marin could not lose more. She had recently been dismissed from her hotel housekeeping job. She asked her bosses if she did something wrong. No, she was told; it was because of “the situation with Venezuelans.”

“We suffered so much to come here,” she said. “Now, because of racism and xenophobia, we can’t even find work.”

On Thursday, a couple hours after Trump had ramped up his fiction about the Haitians in Springfield abducting pets, Viles Dorsainvil wondered if a PowerPoint presentation might help.

Perched on a floral chair at his friend’s apartment, the 38-year-old president of the Haitian Community Help & Support Center read aloud from a slide titled “Breakfast.”

“Breakfast in Haiti begins with ‘akasun,’ a thick, corn-based porridge,” he recited.

Dorsainvil wanted everyone to know: Haitians here don’t eat dogs or cats. They embrace different customs, but they aren’t “savage” - another label Trump had tossed out.

He’d assembled this presentation months before the presidential debate, aiming to educate others in Springfield about who the immigrants they truly were. Unfortunately, the food section had taken on new importance.

Amid the torrent of cat memes, another clip was blazing across the internet - one featuring a local factory owner who described his Haitian employees this way: “They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. They’ll achieve their numbers. They are here to work.”

Dorsainvil hoped more Americans would see that.

Yes, they were good employees. No, they weren’t into drugs. If anything, Prestige Beer - the Haitian lager - was their biggest vice.

The Haitians in Springfield, Dorsainvil said, are Republicans and Democrats. Some own dogs. Some own cats. Many have bought and restored crumbling houses. Many frequent Dunkin’ and Chipotle. Many cram into church on Sunday mornings.

Many are texting him questions like “should we move?” and “are we safe?”

Brulliard reported from Aurora.