Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.
On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.
Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.
If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.
Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking outfor months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.
“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “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.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “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.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: He would “stop all migrant flights,” do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.
But one part of the GOP nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”
What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:
Trump here uses the phrase "remigration." I was unfamiliar with the term, so I googled it.
Wikipedia describes it as a "far-right and Identitarian political concept" largely used to describe the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants from Europe. https://t.co/i8K5yK0sPkpic.twitter.com/vECWjE1DVK
“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrantlanguage in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.
“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”
Thevalue-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.
In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.
Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”
“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.
Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)
More recently, according to localreports, an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan “Rapid remigration creates living space,” a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.
Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.
According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”
As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The use of this kind of language fits the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “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.”)
If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.
But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”
Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”
In reality, Harris’ role was mostly limited to addressing the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras through task forces focused on corruption and smuggling, and by working with the private sector to expand economic opportunities. That increased collaboration is generally viewed favorably by immigration advocates—but Harris’ focus on deterrence-based policies at the border has been criticized. As the Democratic nominee, she has come out in favor of the bipartisan immigration bill championed by Joe Biden, which would, among other things, allow the Department of Homeland Security to suspend most access to asylum outside of ports of entry when border encounters reach a certain level.
I think the hope is that overall, she’ll be taking a much more humanistic approach to immigration.
Adriel D. Orozco is a senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, which works to improve the immigration system. He believes that cutting off access to asylum based on the number of migrant encounters is the wrong approach to solving the problems of a strained and under-resourced system. Orozco does support the Biden administration’s use of parole to allow people to stay in the United States while they seek residency—he hopes to see Harris continue the practice. I spoke with him about Harris’ approach to tackling immigration challenges as a senator and as vice president, and what advocates hope to see from her administration if she becomes the 47th president.
Republicans have falsely billed Harris as Biden’s “border czar.” What do you think is the basis?
I think that there [were] some inaccurate representations of her work from the beginning: A lot of the headlines that were coming out at the time were focused on her addressing immigration generally, and White House officials said that she would oversee a whole government approach to dealing with immigration. There was a lot of confusion.
What was Harris’ actual role in the Biden administration when it came to immigration policy?
President Biden announced at a press conference that Vice President Harris would take on a diplomatic campaign to address the root causes [of migration] from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The idea was to think about why folks were leaving that region. She was tasked with increasing public and private sector investment in the area to strengthen the economies. She was also trying to figure out ways to address corruption within the government and address some of the smuggling and human trafficking networks.
But from the beginning, it was meant to be a long-term strategy. It wasn’t meant for her to be focused on the border policy. That was always under the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
What were the specific goals of the “Root Causes Strategy”?
Really thinking about [the] problems that are occurring in these Northern Triangle countries that are impacting people’s livelihoods and pressuring them to leave the region. She wanted to increase investment, particularly from the private sector, but also investment from other entities like the UN and USAID. Part of it was trying to address some of the networks that were being established around drug trafficking, human trafficking, [and] human smuggling, that were also leading to increased migration levels in the region.
Did the strategy represent a departure from that of previous administrations?
It depends on which administration, but there’s always been an attempt to try to provide investments in the region to support local economies. It was a pretty clear departure from the Trump administration, which was primarily trying to bolster the enforcement mechanisms within these countries to stop migration. So this was a departure in the sense that it was trying to look more broadly, not just from an enforcement and deterrence lens, but also about why people [are] coming.
Has it been successful?
That’s a little bit difficult to pinpoint. There are things that one can point to to say that it was successful. Vice President Harris and the Biden-Harris administration have pointed out that they secured more than $5 billion in private-sector investment in the region. They established a task force to try to create more collaboration between Mexico and these Northern Triangle countries to try to address smuggling and human trafficking. Generally speaking, there are lower numbers of migrants coming from that region, but there are many other reasons why that could be, particularly Mexico preventing them from getting to the US-Mexico border [and] some changes in El Salvador around security issues. So it’s hard to say, but it is important to create more regional cooperation. You can’t really just stop it border by border.
She tries to take a humanistic lens to migration, considering her background as a child of migrants, but she’s also a prosecutor.
What was Harris like in the Senate regarding immigration policy?
She is probably most well known for her ability to almost cross-examine Trump administration officials, particularly around the “zero-tolerance” policy that led to the separation of families at the border. More than 3,000 children were separated from their parents. In terms of policy, she was a vocal proponent of the DACA program and criticized the Trump administration when it rescinded the program. She also advocated for pathways for citizenship and was willing to take the administration head-on when she saw that [it] was doing real harm to immigrant communities.
What would your organization like to see from a Harris administration if she wins?
We would like to see a shift away [from] primarily relying on deterrence and enforcement policy at the border. We think immigration needs to be thought about more holistically. Unfortunately, we’ve seen, from the Biden-Harris administration, a rightward shift in its policy proposals. Particularly the Senate bipartisan bill that both Biden and Harris supported trying to cut off access to asylum as a means to deter migrants. And we think that that’s the wrong approach.
From what I’ve read and seen from Vice President Harris, I think she tries to take a balanced approach. She tries to take a humanistic lens to migration, considering her background as a child of migrants, but she’s also a prosecutor. She also sees the importance of enforcing the law and protecting vulnerable communities, so we think that there’s a prime opportunity for her to become much more of a vocal supporter of increasing pathways for individuals, so that they don’t have to make the treacherous journey to the United States border.
It was difficult to see that the bipartisan Senate bill was largely focused on trying to shut off access to asylum at the border. [We need] the proper balance of saying we need to have security at the border, but also that the folks who have been in the United States for a long time deserve a dignified process to becoming citizens.
What changes would you like to see to the asylum system in the United States?
The Senate border bill wasn’t all bad. Our organization thinks that there were some components that made sense. One was to make the asylum process non-adversarial. So, right now, the overwhelming majority of migrants are unable to get an attorney to represent them in immigration court proceedings, but the government is always represented by their government attorney. So if you’re able to have trained asylum officers, where it’s non-adversarial, you give people more of an opportunity to present their stories, and if they qualify to be in the United States, they can stay.
One of our concerns with heavy-handed deterrence-based policies is that a lot of people are being sent back into harm’s way, when internationally, we have obligations to protect people from being placed back in harm’s way. The unfortunate thing for the Biden-Harris administration is that they have not been able to get the resources they need to address the larger [number] of individuals who had been presenting at the border.
What we’ve seen from her previous work is that she tries to be pragmatic.
And so they have been placed in an impossible situation by Congress, particularly conservatives who decided that they did not want to fund the systems that exist now. The system is broken in a myriad of ways, not just the laws that exist but also the fact that our Congress is unwilling to actually fund the laws that exist.
When it comes to undocumented people already living in the United States, what do you think the Harris administration should do?
We do believe that the pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the United States for a long time should be something she advocates for. I think it’s difficult to see, without a fundamental change in the makeup of Congress, how she would be able to actually get that passed. A lot of the tools that the Biden administration has been using, a Harris administration can use, [like] temporary protected status as a means to protect more populations in the United States.
Has Harris signaled any potential changes from the Biden administration on immigration policy?
We have heard from her speeches that she is supporting the bipartisan border bill and that she would advocate for it if she is able to win. Generally, she has said that she supports a pathway to citizenship. But we haven’t really received specifics on other policies. I do think that given her involvement with the Biden administration, she would take a similar approach around parole and TPS [Temporary Protected Status].
How do you view Harris’ recent move towards a more aggressive approach to campaigning on immigration?
I think it is good to see her out there taking a stronger approach to rhetoric and really trying to shape the narrative. Obviously, she has a strong position, given Donald Trump’s involvement in making sure that the bipartisan bill didn’t move through Congress, but she is adopting the language of Republicans around crime and protection.
It fits with her role as a prosecutor—so part of it is politics, trying to meet folks who are concerned about the border and security, given the years of fear-mongering around that issue. I think what we’ve seen from her previous work is [that] she tries to be pragmatic. I’m sure that she’s trying to think about how you have rules in place while still honoring the folks who have been here for long periods of time without authorization.
It is a little bit concerning that the Democratic Party has adopted that language, but I think the hope is that overall, she’ll be taking a much more humanistic approach to immigration. And her opponent, his campaign’s rhetoric around immigration is just horrific—trying to use the military and the National Guard to round up migrants. So Vice President Harris is looking like the reasonable person in the room, even though, if [you] compare her to four years ago, she would probably be very much to the right in that rhetoric.
In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he willnot be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false.Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.
Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.
Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfieldhas received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”
Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.
But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”
When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”
Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet anotherdebunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.
WATCH: Local officials in Springfield, Ohio, say there’s no evidence of the claims @JDVance has made about Haitian immigrants.
On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims,including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)
Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”
As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he willnot be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false.Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.
Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.
Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfieldhas received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”
Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.
But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”
When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”
Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet anotherdebunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.
WATCH: Local officials in Springfield, Ohio, say there’s no evidence of the claims @JDVance has made about Haitian immigrants.
On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims,including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)
Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”
As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
During the ABC News presidential debate on Tuesday night, Donald Trump invoked over and over the issue he believes will win him the November election: immigration.
That meant a deluge of disparaging comments about migrants. He falsely claimed theyare “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”; he said immigrants coming in are “at the highest level of criminality.” Trump couldn’t even stop himself from repeating the unspeakably racist lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating domestic pets. (The final of these led to a bizarre interaction: The moderators fact-checking the former president’s claims of animal eating as Trump interrupted to say “people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.”)
But, when it came to the framing of immigration, Trump did ultimately have the last word on the debate stage—both literally and figuratively. Just before the head-to-head came to a close, the former president used his final remarks to define the issue on his own perverse terms: “What these people have done to our country, and maybe toughest of all, is allowing millions of people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country,” he said.
The entire debate about immigration, to the extent it even happened, existed within Trump’s harmful idea. The only political points made on immigration on stage were about enforcement.
Vice President Harris hinted at an agenda focused on border enforcement and reviving a now-defunct sweeping bipartisan Senate immigration bill that would have added 1,500 border patrol agents to the force and raised the standards for asylum claims. That proposed legislation, which the Biden administration described as the “toughest” border enforcement measure in decades, has somehow become synonymous with compromise on immigration, despite doing little to advance Democrats’ long-standing promises of legalization for undocumented populations. (Trump torpedoed the bill to avoid handing Democrats a victory on a seemingly intractable issue.)
Trump’s misleading generalizations about “migrant crime,” went largely unchallenged—both by Harris and the media. At times, they were even reinforced. In reactions to JD Vance’s post-debate defense of Trump’s Springfield lies, CNN commentators eagerly pushed back on criticism that the media hasn’t been covering isolated incidents of migrants perpetrating violence. “There have been all kinds of stories and all kinds of coverage of immigrant crime and every state is a border state,” Chris Wallace said. (He did not note that data shows immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.)
On stage, Trump didn’t have to account for how he would carry out his potentially catastrophic and inhumane plans to mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. He just ranted about “millions of criminals” and “terrorists” entering the country to vote for Democrats. Nor did Trump answer why he killed a bipartisan deal that would have delivered on Republicans’ wishlist of border restriction measures without providing a path to legalization for the undocumented. Instead, he evaded the question by disputing Harris’ dismissal of his rallies’ crowd before shifting to pet-eating-migrants.
It should go without saying that the contrast between Harris and Trump on all things, including if not especially immigration, is as clear as day. For one, she’s not proposing building sprawling detention camps to hold thousands of immigrants or vowing to use the military to police the border. But when given the opportunity to further stress that distinction to her advantage, Harris didn’t take it. She didn’t call out Trump’s mass deportation plot or challenge his repeated assertions that migrants commit crimes and represent an existential threat to the United States.
When asked about the Biden administration border policies, Harris—who has a proven track record of advocating for immigrants—insteaddefaulted to putting on her prosecutorial hat and linked immigration to criminality by touting her experience tackling “transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.” To attack Trump for tanking the bipartisan border deal, Harris said, “he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Given the current state of the immigration debate, that may as well be the safer strategy when it comes to such a polarizing issue. But advocates and immigrant rights groups have long disputed the notion that immigration is inherently a liability for the Biden administration—and by proxy Harris—urging them to adopt an unapologetically pro-immigrant stance and go on the offensive against Republicans’ xenophobic agenda.
Ahead of the debate, I spoke with Michelle Ming, political director at the immigrant-youth led United We Dream network. On Monday, the organization’s political and electoral arm endorsed Harris, saying in a statement the goal is to block another Trump presidency and prevent mass deportations. “We know the fear that our communities lived with under his presidency, and just the uncertainty of making it through another day in this country without being rounded up, deported or arrested,” Ming said. “We feel deep in our bodies this understanding that we can’t go back to that, our communities can’t survive another four years of that.”
Still, that doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly approve of Harris. “I think what Kamala Harris needs to do is get up there and really make herself stand apart from Trump, rather than trying to be more Republican than Trump on immigration, which is, frankly, something that it feels like she’s trying to do right now, or that the Democrats are telling her to do,” she added. “That’s not a winning strategy.”
The opening minutes of the very first question of the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday saw the former president alluding to a racist lie—which has been roundly debunked by law enforcement officials—about Haitian immigrants.
“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States,” Trump said in response to a question regarding his plans for the economy. “You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country.”
But that was just the mere mention of “Springfield, Ohio,” now shorthand for a virulent conspiracy theory that has swiftly captured the Republican Party in recent days. Later in the debate, Trump unleashed, fully leaning into the blatant racism by repeating the vile lie that immigrants, specifically those from Haiti, in far-flung corners of the US are eating pets.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”
The remarks, by a former president and GOP presidential candidate, are evidence of the complete and total platforming of a viral lie, as it progressed from one single Facebook comment to far-right influencers, then to prominent members of Congress, and tonight, the presidential debate stage.
"They're eating the pets," says Donald Trump, repeating a debunked claim about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
“There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” police said on Monday. pic.twitter.com/wYs96Aekt1
Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has said a lot of wild things. But on Sunday, he made headlines for something he didn’t say.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance left the door open to renewed family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Despite moderator Kristen Welker directly asking Vance three times if families would be separated in a second Trump administration, Vance failed to clearly answer. Instead, he parroted the right’s critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, falsely claiming she had been designated as “border czar.”
A federal judge assailed the policy as one of the country’s “most shameful chapters.”
“Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that have come in just since Kamala Harris became the border czar,” Vance told Welker.
“She was put in charge of the root causes of migration,” Welker corrected Vance.
“Well the root causes of migration, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refused to do her job as border czar,” Vance replied.
My colleague Isabela Dias has explained how that’s not true—and how “border czar” fails to accurately describe exactly what Harris was tasked with:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of [the Department of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
As Welker pressed Vance on whether a new Trump administration would separate families, one way he dodged the question was by claiming the Biden-Harris administration was already doing so.
It’s unclear what Vance was referring to, but as Welker pointed out, under the Biden administration “there are some families who have been separated…because their parents are criminals,” contrasting the situation with the “zero tolerance policy” launched by Trump’s Department of Justice in May 2018.
The controversial scheme memorably—and heartbreakingly—led to kids being held in cages and years-long disastrous ripple effects. Trump issued an executive order meant to end the policy just a month later, following massive public backlash. But families remained in legal limbo for years as a result. The policy was conclusively killed in December 2023, when a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement to end it, writing that the separations of migration families represented “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”
In 2021, when the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite the families, it estimated that 3,924 kids had been separated under Trump. The average age of children separated from their parents? Nine years old, and more than a quarter of them were under 5, according to federal officials. As of last fall, roughly a thousand kids remained separated from their parents.
“Whether your administration would tear families apart and put kids in cages should not be a tough question,” wrote Kevin Munoz, a senior spokesperson for Harris-Walz 2024. “But JD Vance is ducking and dodging because he knows Donald Trump would go as far as using the military to tear children from their mother’s arms and round up migrants into mass detention camps.”
In another part of his Meet the Press appearance, Vance tried to claim that his comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” had been a critique of government policies unfriendly to families. “I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country where we’ve become anti-family,” Vance told Welker on Meet the Press, “and I would like to change that.”
Somehow, he does not see Trump’s family separation policy as part of the problem.
Update, August 25: This post now includes comment from the Harris campaign.
Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has said a lot of wild things. But on Sunday, he made headlines for something he didn’t say.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance left the door open to renewed family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Despite moderator Kristen Welker directly asking Vance three times if families would be separated in a second Trump administration, Vance failed to clearly answer. Instead, he parroted the right’s critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, falsely claiming she had been designated as “border czar.”
A federal judge assailed the policy as one of the country’s “most shameful chapters.”
“Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that have come in just since Kamala Harris became the border czar,” Vance told Welker.
“She was put in charge of the root causes of migration,” Welker corrected Vance.
“Well the root causes of migration, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refused to do her job as border czar,” Vance replied.
My colleague Isabela Dias has explained how that’s not true—and how “border czar” fails to accurately describe exactly what Harris was tasked with:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of [the Department of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
As Welker pressed Vance on whether a new Trump administration would separate families, one way he dodged the question was by claiming the Biden-Harris administration was already doing so.
It’s unclear what Vance was referring to, but as Welker pointed out, under the Biden administration “there are some families who have been separated…because their parents are criminals,” contrasting the situation with the “zero tolerance policy” launched by Trump’s Department of Justice in May 2018.
The controversial scheme memorably—and heartbreakingly—led to kids being held in cages and years-long disastrous ripple effects. Trump issued an executive order meant to end the policy just a month later, following massive public backlash. But families remained in legal limbo for years as a result. The policy was conclusively killed in December 2023, when a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement to end it, writing that the separations of migration families represented “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”
In 2021, when the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite the families, it estimated that 3,924 kids had been separated under Trump. The average age of children separated from their parents? Nine years old, and more than a quarter of them were under 5, according to federal officials. As of last fall, roughly a thousand kids remained separated from their parents.
“Whether your administration would tear families apart and put kids in cages should not be a tough question,” wrote Kevin Munoz, a senior spokesperson for Harris-Walz 2024. “But JD Vance is ducking and dodging because he knows Donald Trump would go as far as using the military to tear children from their mother’s arms and round up migrants into mass detention camps.”
In another part of his Meet the Press appearance, Vance tried to claim that his comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” had been a critique of government policies unfriendly to families. “I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country where we’ve become anti-family,” Vance told Welker on Meet the Press, “and I would like to change that.”
Somehow, he does not see Trump’s family separation policy as part of the problem.
Update, August 25: This post now includes comment from the Harris campaign.
On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.
The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold.
Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.
But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.
If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.
While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.
In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h
On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.
The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold.
Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.
But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Former Trump senior adviser and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took to X to distort the border numbers. “CBP just issued a press release admitting that Border Czar Harris has quietly smuggled nearly 1M illegals aliens into the US using a fast-pass entry phone app,” he claimed in reference to the 765,000 migrants the agency says have lawfully followed the Biden administration’s rules and sought appointments through the CBP One mobile app since January 2023.
If Republicans don’t want to buy into CBP data, perhaps they should look at another indication that the numbers at the border have been in decline. A recent investigation by NBC News found that fewer border crossings are having an impact on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, which has transported thousands of migrants to cities across the country, from Denver to New York. Officials from cities that have previously received busloads of migrants from Texas told NBC News that they hadn’t gotten any buses since January.
While the Biden administration is claiming the border crossing slowdown as a win, migrants with legitimate asylum claims are being turned away at the border, potentially facing harm and danger as a result. Since the June executive order, which also released CBP agents from the mandate of asking migrants coming to the border if they had a reason to ask for asylum, referrals for “credible fear” interviews (a first step in the screening process) have fallen by 90 percent, according to the American Immigration Council.
In early June, the Biden admin implement a new regulation telling Border Patrol agents they no longer had to ask migrants if they were seeking asylum. With that safeguard eliminated, credible fear referrals have dropped over 90% in two months, falling below 2,000 total in July. pic.twitter.com/skx3PxZz0h
On the morning of August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. He murdered 23 people and injured 22 others. Most who died were Latino, including eight people from Mexico.
The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”
These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.
At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”
Today, Trump is running again using the same potent demagoguery he wielded during his presidency and prior campaigns. Five years to the day after the massacre in El Paso, he held a rally in Atlanta with running mate JD Vance, and, over the course of an hour, warned a half dozen times about hordes of murderous foreigners overrunning America.
“Forty or fifty million illegal aliens will invade our country during the next four years if they’re in,” Trump said of his Democratic opponents at the outset. He soon continued: “Many of them that are coming in are from prisons and jails and mental institutions, insane asylums.” He taunted media covering the rally as he referenced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a provocation he now uses to depict migrant “insanity” and brutality.
He went on to vow he would “stop the invasion” and expanded on the peril: “These people are so violent and vicious…These are the worst people anywhere in the world coming into our country. They’re coming in at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again,” one threat assessment source told me.
Audience reaction was relatively subdued as Trump recited these lines from a teleprompter, perhaps because they are such a familiar fixture of his speeches. But deep into this speech, the next escalation played differently. The danger, Trump now further alleged, came from a grand conspiracy against him, one involving migrants. He warned that his political opponents who “hate our country” are “actually trying to get them to sign up and vote.” Then came the climax: “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
A close listener could hear echoes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump invoked loss of country and the danger of inaction against an election that he falsely claimed was stolen from him. Now, in his telling, that conspiracy promised to use legions of evil foreigners against him and his supporters.
The crowd cheered, beginning to stir more as Trump recounted a recent murder of a university student at the hands of a Venezuelan man illegally in the country. “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley,” Trump declared. He railed against “migrant crime” and falsely claimed that “thousands” of Americans were being killed in this way.
He continued: “If Harris wins, a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators will flood into your communities. If I win, on day one we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
The crowd roared at this signature line from his speech.
“We have no choice,” Trump said.
Who was listening? Perhaps some disturbed young man there in the crowd, or elsewhere watching Trump live on YouTube—perhaps someone who might feel enraged, like the El Paso mass shooter surely did when he wrote down the lie that Democrats “intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.”
Shortly after Trump’s speech in Atlanta, I talked to a longtime threat assessment source with expertise in counterterrorism and far-right extremist groups. His response was blunt when I noted that no major media focused their coverage on Trump’s inflammatory language, almost as if all that rhetoric was just business as usual.
“There’s nothing normal about any of this,” the source said. “We have the First Amendment and he can say whatever he wants, that’s our democracy. But it really disturbs me how politicians in his party won’t stand up and say one word against it now. The country really needs that. We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again.”
The use of Trump’s rhetoric to justify racist and organized political violence began early in his presidency. Strained denials of that reality crumbledfor good with the horrific events at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This June, I reported again on Trump’s years of incitement against his many perceived enemies, a method known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. The results, as I’ve reported, grow even worse when a high-profile figure emphasizes themes of contempt and disgust.
Security and law enforcement sources told me that topping the list of concerns now for election-year violence are threats stemming from white supremacist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement. After the assassination attempt against the ex-president in mid-July, sources told me that the promotion of conspiracy theories and false blame on Democrats by Trump allies could provoke retaliatory attacks.
At the Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, JD Vance doubled down on that very blame, declaring in his speech that Trump’s political opponents “tried to kill him.” Meanwhile, a new intelligence report from the FBI and Homeland Security focused on the upcoming Democratic National Convention highlights similar concerns about retaliatory violence.
I contacted three people with the Trump campaign asking specifically for comment on these warnings about political violence: spokespersons Brian Hughes and Steven Cheung, and Trump senior advisor Alina Habba. None of them responded.
America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit.
Trump shows no signs of stopping the incitement. Last Thursday, in a rambling speech to reporters assembled for a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he again emphasized that America was under invasion by millions of migrants “from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums.” They are flooding in “from all over the world,” he claimed. “Prisons are being emptied into our country.”
He delivered more of the same at a rally on Friday in Montana: “Fifty million of them… they’re destroying our country, they’re ruining our country… migrants praying on our women and our girls.”
Fear and loathing, dressed up as just another stump speech.
Trump’s incitement focused on migrants is not mutually exclusive with the fact that America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit. In early 2024, Congress was poised to pass a bipartisan border security bill, with President Biden ready to sign it. Trump killed the deal. No one bothered trying to hide why he pressured Republicans to do his bidding: He wanted immigration to remain his political weapon.
“The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem, because he wants to blame Biden for it, is really appalling,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters in January, the deal dead.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped author the legislation, later revealed how “a popular” media commentator had threatened him: “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year,” that Trump ally told him, according to Lankford, “I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”
What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?
Trump’s relentless fear-mongering against migrants underscores how he has always seen immigration and the border as essential to his political power. There is zero doubt that his current trajectory—begun nearly a decade ago when he announced his first campaign and inveighed against Mexican criminals and “rapists”—will continue to the November election.
Most news media are no longer paying any of this much attention. But that carries risk of the public forgetting about the violence that has already occurred. More broadly, shouldn’t we be asking: What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?
According to one of Trump’s own senior national security advisers in the White House, Trump was informed explicitly and repeatedly about how his rhetoric had been used to justify acts of violence. Credible evidence of his awareness—and his demonstrated unwillingness to respond meaningfully against the violence—suggests that, for him, more bloodshed will be welcome.
Five years ago, the first National Conservatism conference—a gathering on the right to propose a more populist version of conservatism—was held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC.
The event, organized by the then-nascent Edmund Burke Foundation, drew rising stars of the New Right: Sen. John Hawley (R-Mo.), a clean-shaven JD Vance, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and tech billionaire (and eventual backer of Vance’s run for Congress) Peter Thiel. The coalition convened to push a new ideology. They hoped to create a conservative ethos “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation” and an “intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”
In a taxonomy of young conservatives, Sam Adler-Bell in the New Republicpointed out that these NatCons (as they’re called) are among a variety of alternative ideas popping up to intellectualize Trumpism. But, in recent years, they have taken on a larger cache. New York Times columnist David Brooks, dismayed by the conference’s rise, would in 2021 call NatCon attendees the “terrifying future of the American right.”
During his opening remarks at that first conference, organizer David Brog invoked a recurring theme throughout the event—the dilution of the essence of the American nation. “We give no aid to our immigrants,” Brog said, “when we permit the erosion of the very culture that motivated them to move here in the first place.” Brog’s statement could be generously interpreted as charitable to immigrants, but it veiled a belief that was, and is still, at the heart of national conservatives’ pitch: Immigration is to blame for the fall of the Western world. It has become a source of weakness and an existential threat to the social fabric holding countries like the United States together.
To national conservatives, immigrants seem to hold no value unless fully assimilated. And no one drove that point home more forcefully at the inaugural conference than Amy Wax, a controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor, who made a “cultural case for limited immigration.” Conservatives, she offered, should push for an approach that preserves the country’s identity as a “Western and First World nation” and considers the “practical difficulties of importing large numbers of people from backwards states.”
In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is not an idea but our people.
That meant adopting a “cultural-distance nationalism” that embraces the vision “that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Wax argued that Donald Trump was right to question why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.” (He was referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa.) The celebration of diversity, she concluded, “means that we lose some of these norms…that make our life what it is.”
National Conservatism began as an effort to intellectually retrofit Trumpism with a coherent framework. Today, the annual conference previews the direction of thought on the right in the United States and abroad. The most recent edition, which happened in downtown DC in early July, assembled a handful of Republican lawmakers such as senators Rick Scott of Florida and Utah’s Mike Lee, a failed presidential contestant supportive of Trump (Vivek Ramaswamy), Hungarian emissaries, and a constellation of right-wing groups plotting the next conservative administration.
“National conservatives started out as a thoughtful intellectual movement,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, a political analyst and author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, who has attended several national conservatism conferences over the years. “As time goes on, they’ve taken more and more the characteristics of a tribe.”
Their “big tent” elite movement rejects the laissez-faire economic tradition of the past and faults a “cosmopolitan” regime with the unraveling of the American “way of life.” They repudiate imperialism and globalism and wish for a muscular government that stands for the traditional values of family and Christianity. But the one reigning conviction bounding US conservatives and their international counterparts appears to be an inflated, when not outright fabricated, fear that immigration equals doom—be it from cultural change or the Great Replacement.
The halls and stage of the fourth National Conservatism conference in the US capital reeked of jubilant and, at times, vengeful confidence. “This is the first conservative conference in memory where we can look around at our country and the world and say, we’re winning,” Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the MAGA Conservative Partnership Institute, said. “National conservatism is the only kind of conservatism there is,” the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared.
The largely youthful looking, groomed men in attendance were told that the woke radical left, fake news media, corrupt ruling elites, and anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian social justice warriors destroying the American way of life in a totalitarian fashion were being found out. Manhood is under attack and progressives are brainwashing and forcibly changing the sex of children, while imposing a “group quota regime”—and finally, this group gathered to fight back. All this had been done with the acquiescence of spineless mainstream Republicans and the legacy right who seem unaware of a brewing “Cold Civil War,” as Tom Klingenstein of the Claremont Institute put it. No more. Here comes the New Right.
For all the “owning the libs” discourse, theattacks on so-called gender ideology,the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism, the gathered “army of spirited counterrevolutionaries”—powered by nitro cold brew provided by the American Moment, an organization recruiting and training conservatives to work in Washington—at the Capital Hilton hotel rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.
The threat as they perceive it takes many forms. In the words of Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior adviser on all things immigration, it is a border being invaded by millions of would-be Democratic “illegal voters” and “the world’s fugitives, the world’s predators, the world’s rapists and murderers.” For Mark Krikorian, from the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, it is vulnerable asylum seekers.
“Where the national conservatism movement has made the most progress, not just here, but I think overseas as well is the recognition that the real threat to American democracy it’s certainly not Donald Trump, it’s not even some foreign dictator who doesn’t like America or our values,” JD Vance said during a dinner. “The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American democracy.”
Never mind the fact that the long-term prospects of declining birth rates, a rallying cry for Vance, and shrinking population call exactly for more immigration, not less. The Congressional Budget Office projects that starting in 2040 net immigration will account for all population growth in the United States. But for Vance, the idea here is not actually about population decline as much as who is declining. As Margaret Talbot recently wrote in the New Yorker, Vance is more pronatalism than pro-family. “And pronatalism, as it’s been developing lately in certain conservative circles,” she notes, “typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.”
Vance made a populist economic and cultural argument for curbing immigration, which he said “has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.” It is the cause of lower wages for American workers, spikes in housing prices, and crowded emergency rooms, he has claimed without evidence. “The country has simply taken in too many, too quickly,” Vance posted on X in May, “and unless we fix it the United States won’t exist.”
To that end, the New Right, and Vance, have been working to define what the “nation” means in common parlance.
For a long time, it has been said that “America is an idea.” Joe Biden repeated the line in his statement to the country after withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race; telling viewers that the US is “an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.” Former House Speaker Paul Ryan once said, “America is the only nation founded on an idea, not on an identity.” But national conservatives want to move past the “myth” of a propositional nation based on universal principles of freedom and equality.
“I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said Trump’s former head of ICE.
This country, “Never Trumper” turned vice presidential candidate Vance said during his speeches at the National Conservatism conference and later at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, “is not just an idea,” but “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” It is a homeland. In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is our people.
“Commitments to abstract principles or institutions are simply less capable of inspiring a feeling of belonging and a strong sense of identity than appeals to a shared history, a shared culture, a shared religion or ethnicity, and sometimes a shared race,” says Rogers Smith, a University of Pennsylvania scholar of American political thought. “We’ve had those kinds of appeals throughout American history.” He cites as an example the rise of nativism in the mid-1800s in response to the increased arrival of poor Irish and German immigrants.
But Vance and others within the national conservatism movement today, Smith explains, associate with new conservative thinkers who go further. “They don’t just say that you need a sense of identity that doesn’t rest on an idea alone,” Smith notes. “They say the ideas of the American founding were bad ideas.” He adds: “It scares me to death. I think it appeals to some of the worst features of American society.”
The fact that the “conservative movement is leaning into this, fueling it, is no surprise,” says Janelle Wong, a University of Maryland professor who researches race, immigration, and political mobilization. “Those who view or agree with the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world—that’s ethnic Christian nationalism—agree with the great replacement theory rhetoric.” Sixty percent of Republicans said they believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” in a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. “We’re talking about something that has become relatively mainstream among conservatives,” Wong says.
National conservatives’ reverie of immigrants as the downfall of the West is so powerful that it calls for the harshest of responses. The asylum system, Krikorian, from the anti-immigration think-tank, said at NatCon, represents a “surrender of sovereignty” and a reframing of “immigration as a right rather than a privilege.”His solution? To have the United States withdraw its longstanding commitment to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Later, in his speech, he toyed with a plan similar to one proposed in the United Kingdom, in which asylum seekers would be sent to Rwanda. “All kinds of countries,” he told the crowd “would be willing to take our money to host a small number of illegal immigrants.”
It was like this throughout my time at the conference. Another speaker advocated for doing away with the commonly held distinction between legal immigration as positive and unlawful immigration as negative, suggesting ending certain categories of work visas and the diversity visa program. “Please replace us, just do it legally,” Kevin Lynn, executive director of the deceptively named Progressives for Immigration Reform, said mockingly. He also suggested a screening of tourists to prevent potential “anchor babies.”
Theo Wold, who served in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and on domestic policy issues, took it even further. He called out the experiment of “massive importation” of immigrants to the United States, saying it is “unfair to millions of Americans who have been pushed aside for the arrival of millions of foreign nationals.” The only sustainable form of immigration, Wold added, comes with assimilation. (Wold bemoaned that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs discourages “Americanization” efforts.) “Multiculturalism is, at its core, an anti-Western philosophy,” he said. “Disunion is its expressed goal. It’s time not just to end mass immigration, but to reverse it. It’s time to decolonize America.”
“The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more,” said JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president.
This is the intellectual foundation of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, which are shared by the Republican National Committee’s official 2024 policy platform and were cheered on by RNC attendees carrying “Mass Deportation Now” signs. If elected, Trump and his aides want to pursue sweeping removal operations regardless of due process and build sprawling detention camps.
Speaking at the National Conservatism conference, Tom Homan, former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, told the audience he was ready to lead the deportation campaign: “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he proudly said to a round of applause. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
At times, the bubbling rage against immigrants was palpable. During the Q&A portion of the border discussion with Krikorian, Wold, Homan, and others, a woman approached the mic to shout at the panelists, urging them to confirm her suspicion that immigrants were being purposefully brought into the country to be turned into Democratic voters, a baseless claim given credence by Republicans, who recently passed a law in the House requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. When the panelists didn’t give her the exact answer she was looking for, the woman got increasingly aggrieved. At a different session, after a speaker posed a rhetorical question about what’s the biggest threat facing the country, someone in the audience angrily yelled, “Illegals!”
“There’s a lot of speculation that the kind of conservatism we see nowadays is in some sense a resurgence of the Old Right and that it’s coming along with those xenophobic attitudes, explicitly Christian nationalist attitudes, a sense of valorization of America as a people—and largely Eurocentric people—rather than America as a creedal nation,” Kabaservice says. “I think what you’re seeing is one end of a cycle within American conservatism. It’s not clear that this is the future of American conservatism going forward. But it certainly seems to be until such a time that Trumpism ceases to be the main operating force on the conservative movement and the GOP.”
He recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous 1989 farewell address to the nation. In it, Reagan talks about America as a “shining city on the hill” and “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Kabaservice says, “It’s very odd for those of us who’ve lived long enough to remember Reagan to see how there’s almost no trace of that kind of attitude in today’s populist Republican Party.”
Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Carol Guzy/ZUMA; Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty (2)
For decades after its founding in 1924, the Border Patrol was a bureaucratic backwater: poorly funded and largely left to its own devices. Then came 9/11, and a flood of federal resources to “secure our borders” and add thousands of new agents. Yet the oversight necessary to manage a huge federal agency—let alone one that long had made its own rules—never really caught up, and scandals quickly followed: infiltration by cartels, corruption, assault, rape, murder. Within a few years, the Border Patrol had become one of the nation’s largest, and least accountable, law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the US-Mexico border became even more politicized. And then Donald Trump entered the fray.
For our September+October issue, we shined a light on the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago, and that could once again put the Border Patrol at the center of Trump’s nativist plans.
For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago.Read the whole package here.
In February, as the state of Texas went to court to defend itself from an “invasion,” and a far-right convoy calling itself “God’s army” hosted anti-immigrant rallies throughout the Southwest, Fox News repeatedly turned to one of Donald Trump’s trusted emissaries to explain to viewers what was happening at the US-Mexico border.
Over multiple appearances that month, Brandon Judd—the pugilistic president of the Border Patrol union and, according to the Wall Street Journal, someone who could have “an important administration role” in a future Trump White House—blasted President Joe Biden every chance he got.
“He is not going to listen to voices of reason,” Judd said on one show. “Everything he does is too little, too late,” he said in another. Biden has “never given any rationale for anything he does,” he added in a third. In a FoxNews.com op-ed, Judd wrote that “the agents who have worked under both Trump and Biden have experienced first-hand the competent, caring leadership of Trump and the deadly, disastrous ‘leadership’ of Joe Biden.”
A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described Judd to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.”
It was quintessential Judd: combative, hyperbolic, and unabashedly political. On May 18, the 50-year-old stepped down as president of the National Border Patrol Council after a decade in power, having spearheaded the Border Patrol’s transformation from a largely nonpolitical backwater agency into one of the most influential, and divisive, law enforcement groups in the country. The union’s full-throated support for Trump’s immigration policies has inextricably tied the agency’s roughly 19,000 agents to MAGA politics, while Judd became a right-wing media darling and de facto spokesman for the agency. His tenure as union chief is key to understanding the politics of the border in the 2024 election—and the type of person who could wield power in a second Trump administration.
A dozen interviews with former agents and Trump administration officials reveal a complex picture of Judd and his legacy. While the Border Patrol union has become more powerful than ever, the agency has become notorious for recklessness, and rank-and-file agents are leaving en masse. Internally, Judd has a mixed reputation, at best. A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described him to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.” “He is a political hack,” says retired Border Patrol agent Gil Maza, who runs the popular Instagram account OldPatrolHQ and says he receives up to 100 messages daily from current Border Patrol agents. “He is burning on all cylinders for a political future, a political position, or simply to be in the circuit after he retires as a contributor for Fox News or whatever.” (Judd would not answer many of my questions, but told me he is “happily retired and will not be returning to public life.” The National Border Patrol Council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Born in Arizona, Judd began his career as a field agent in California’s Imperial Valley in 1997. He served stints in Arizona and Maine and took on various leadership roles in the union before being elected its president. From 2015 to 2020, Judd worked in Montana, about an hour south of the Saskatchewan border. He retired from the Border Patrol in May 2023, but stayed on as union president.
Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House.
The 2016 presidential election put Judd on the political map when, under his guidance, the union endorsed Trump—the first time in its history it had picked sides in a presidential campaign. It believed Trump would “embrace the ideas of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents rather than listening to the management yes-men who say whatever they are programmed to say,” according to a statement. The decision was presented as a collective choice, but it was ultimately made by Judd and the union’s 11-member executive board.
Just one week before the endorsement, Stephen Miller, the adviser who orchestrated Trump’s hardline immigration policies, told Breitbart News that Trump would “work closely, directly, and intimately with the National Border Patrol Council to develop a border policy for this nation.” That promise quickly became reality. Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House. When Trump demanded Congress allocate $5.7 billion toward building a border wall, at the cost of a government shutdown, Judd aligned himself with Trump, even as Border Patrol agents worked without pay. (They were later paid back.) Judd’s position that border walls are an “absolute necessity” was all the more remarkable given that only a few years earlier, the union had opposed them. In a since-deleted FAQ posted in 2012, it asserted that border walls would be “wasting taxpayer money.”
Judd’s proximity to Trump was unprecedented. He stood by his side in January 2017 when Trump called for hiring thousands more Border Patrol agents. In an agency where chain of command is paramount, Judd’s influence underscored Trump’s willingness to flout norms. “He bet early on the Trump train and it paid off,” says Ron Vitiello, who served as Border Patrol chief in 2017 and whom Trump later nominated as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That changed his profile in the government.” (As recently as June of this year, Trump appeared to name-check Judd in the first presidential debate, noting the union endorsement and claiming, “We had the safest border in history.”)
“He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” says a top Homeland Security official under Trump.
While the union maintained a modicum of political independence—in 2018, it endorsed three Senate Democrats whom it considered strong on border security—Judd supported virtually anything Trump wanted, says Andrew Meehan, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. “He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” he says. “He sat on the sidelines and tried to create more opportunities for himself to be elevated and sit next to the president and deliver on nothing.”
As the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants ramped up, an embarrassing scandal put the agency and the union on the defensive. When ProPublica reported in 2019 that agents were posting racist and sexually offensive comments to a secret Facebook group, Judd minimized the story by saying “it was a very small number of people” and “those individuals must be held accountable.” (In the end, most of the agents involved received only light penalties and were allowed to remain in their posts, according to a congressional investigation.) Later, in 2021, after agents aggressively responded to Haitian migrants crossing the border near Del Rio, Texas—including a now-infamous image of an agent on horseback appearing to strike a migrant with his reins—a 511-page federal investigation concluded that while agents had not struck migrants, there were “failures at multiple levels,” including inappropriate language and lack of supervision. In response, Judd said the investigation was flawed because Biden administration officials had spoken out against the abuse. “Those investigators have no choice but to find wrongdoing,” he told NPR.
The agency has a toxic, undisciplined culture, according to a high-ranking Border Patrol agent who retired in 2022. He says agents often acted as if they were in a college fraternity. “They liked being recognized as military,” says the former agent. “But when it came to the discipline of their agents, the union would fight everything.”Another high-ranking former agent says the union resisted efforts to make the agency more accountable. “There are no fitness standards in the Border Patrol,” he says. “As management we wanted to enforce fitness standards. And the union fought that tooth and nail.” Instead, he and others say, Judd and other union leaders were obsessed with changing the rules so agents could show tattoos and have beards, which they believed would improve morale and recruitment. (Since the rule change in 2019, the bald Judd is often seen with a stubble beard, giving him the look of a scruffy Telly Savalas.)
Despite the looser grooming standards, agency morale has since plummeted, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, former Border Patrol agents, and even Judd—who testified before Congress that, in 25 years, he had “never seen the morale lower.” A massive number of agents who were brought on during a hiring spree in the early 2000s are expected to retire soon. Amid a record level of migrants entering at the southern border—apprehensions have more than doubled since 2019—workloads have increased dramatically as staffing has stayed consistent, according to the inspector general. As the union predicted years ago, the border wall hasn’t deterred anyone, and immigration is once again one of the top issues on voters’ minds.
The same day the union endorsed Biden’s legislation, Trump posted that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”
So when in February a border bill that would have tightened asylum rules and beefed up enforcement came up for a vote in Congress, the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation and Judd made impassioned appearances on Fox News promoting the bill. In a widely shared statement, he said that the bill would reduce illegal border crossings and that “while not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction.”
There was one major problem: Trump, who wanted to showcase border chaos as part of his reelection campaign. The same day the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation, Trump posted on Truth Social that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”
The bill failed.
Within weeks, Judd was back at Trump’s side. He accompanied Trump to the southern border and alleged agents were “pissed” at Biden. He also made the dubious assertion that Trump’s opposition to the bill had “nothing to do with politics.” Trump “understands that if a bill were to be passed today, that there would be no appetite to pass a better bill when he’s in office,” Judd told Fox News in March from the State of the Union, where he was a guest of bill co-sponsor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).
Now, eight years after the union first endorsed Trump, many agents question the political turn the agency has taken. “As a law enforcement administration, employees at all times should be apolitical in nature,” says Rodolfo Karisch, who retired in 2019 as the chief patrol agent of the Rio Grande Valley. “It’s the mission of what we signed up for; good, bad, or indifferent, we have a job to carry out.”
Even Maza, a Trump supporter, laments the union’s endorsement of the former president. “I have good friends in the Border Patrol who are staunch and dedicated Democrats,” he says. “The union should not be involved in endorsing candidates because that does not adequately represent the agency.”
The union hasn’t yet endorsed Trump again, perhaps an indication of discontent over its embrace of right-wing politics. Or perhaps the union is just playing it safe, in case Democrats win the White House again. Still, it seems unlikely it will return to its nonpartisan roots. The executive vice president, Paul Perez, also an ardent Trump supporter, will fill the remainder of Judd’s term.
Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant stance has gotten even more extreme. On the stump, he has called immigrants “animals” and “not humans,” and promised to deport millions of them. Should he win, the Border Patrol—and perhaps Judd—will be on the front lines, carrying out his vision.
Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.
Image credits: Adam Gray/Getty; Vadzim Mashkou/Shutterstock, Lev Radin/Shutterstock
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