The 2024 Republican ticket’s incitement of violence against Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, is revealing in more ways than one.

Former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) have only doubled down on their baseless, debunked smear of Haitian immigrants as kidnappers of pets and spreaders of communicable disease despite numerous fact-checks from both Springfield’s elected leaders and the media. This has caused panic among the local Haitian community, with some residents expressing to the Haitian Times that they feel unsafe conducting daily activities and are considering moving to flee political violence once again, as they did when they left Haiti.

In a vacuum, the Springfield story could be seen merely as a misinformation campaign with real-world consequences, as more than 30 bomb threats have been called into Springfield’s municipal offices and even several local elementary schools. But when zooming out, it’s easy to see how Trump and Vance singling out Haitian refugees in a small Ohio town — and now in Charleroi, Pennsylvania as well — is a preview of the mass deportation program he’s running on and will likely kick off early into a potential second term if he wins the November election.

Trump’s lies about Haitians serve a darker purpose

Almost immediately after JD Vance started spreading the lie about Haitians supposedly eating pets in Springfield, the city’s manager assured residents that there was no actual evidence that was happening. Even Vance acknowledged that the “rumors” he was hearing may “turn out to be false.” When Trump said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” ABC moderator David Muir immediately fact-checked him. And in an interview with CNN host Dana Bash, Vance said he was willing to “create stories” about migrants in order to spread anti-immigrant narratives in the media.

Given that they know the truth, the fact that the GOP presidential ticket is still continuing to spread a rumor known to be false is more simply to stoke xenophobia among everyday Americans. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent argued that the endgame of Trump’s campaign is to keep the national conversation about immigration “as charged with hate and rage as possible” heading into the election.

“The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke — that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species — simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate,” he wrote. “To Trump, it is the immigration debate.”

Sargent noted that while the media and the voting public has been largely distracted by the false rumor about pets being kidnapped and eaten, a secondary lie has been allowed to avoid media scrutiny and go unchecked. In a separate article, Sargent quoted Chris Cook, the health commissioner of Clark County, Ohio (which houses Springfield), who said that there is also no evidence to back up the Ohio senator’s claims that the influx of Haitian migrants has resulted in an increased spread of communicable diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. In fact, Cook said that when looking at “all reportable diseases as a whole,” spread is actually on the decline. The lone exception is Covid-19, which CDC data shows is still prevalent in the United States (though on the decline in Ohio and 22 other states).

The truth is inconvenient to the story Trump and Vance want to tell. As Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine wrote in a September op-ed in the New York Times, Springfield’s Haitian community is valued by both local residents and business leaders, writing that the influx of new immigrants provided a critical labor force needed in the wake of the pandemic that allowed local businesses to stay open. 

Additionally, Reuters reported that wage growth grew by 6% annually in Springfield after the arrival of Haitian migrants — roughly twice the rate of wage growth nationally. And as wages grew, crime rates remained stagnant, suggesting that Trump and Vance’s assertion that the thousands of Haitian refugees moving to Springfield made the city less safe is also false.

Religion News Service (RNS) spoke with local clergy in Springfield who said Vance actively inflamed the issue with demagoguery rather than doing his job as a senator. The Rev. Carl Ruby, who is the senior pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, told RNS that tensions were initially high last fall when a migrant accidentally killed an 11 year-old boy after crashing into a school bus, but that Vance’s rumor-mongering ripped the band-aid off of the wound.

“It really kind of quieted down until our local leaders reached out to JD Vance for help getting financial assistance,” said Ruby. “And instead of providing financial assistance, he politicized it.”

When all available data refutes the claims that Trump and Vance are making, the true purpose of their rhetoric becomes clearer: Their attacks on Black and Brown migrants are instead meant to condition white residents of these towns to support the forced removal of their neighbors should they be elected to the White House this fall.

Trump is showing us exactly how his mass deportations will work

The cornerstone of the former president’s 2024 candidacy is the proposed mass detainment and removal of millions of immigrants. As the New York Times reported last fall, the former president would work in coordination with Republican-run states to use a combination of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and local and county law enforcement to round up and detain millions of immigrants each year. He would also rely on Republican governors to deploy their respective National Guard troops to assist with raids on immigrants’ homes.

Stephen Miller — an outed white nationalist who is also Trump’s top immigration adviser — indicated in a February speech to National Rifle Association activists that the number of immigrants to be deported will likely number at least 10 million using “conservative numbers.” The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein live-tweeted excerpts of the speech, where Miller envisioned sprawling detention camps complete with airstrips in which planes full of immigrants would be taking off multiple times a day.

“Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a September 2023 rally in Iowa. This is a reference to former President Dwidght Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” (a racist slur aimed at Hispanics), which deported as many as 1.3 million people — including some naturalized U.S. citizens.

Trump drawing inspiration from “Operation Wetback” should be seen as a major indicator about what Americans could expect to see between 2025 and 2029 if Trump wins a second term. History.com noted that Eisenhower’s racist anti-immigrant campaign relied on “anti-Mexican sentiment” that included “harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing, and irresponsible.” And Miller’s description of regular deportation flights is a direct nod to Eisenhower’s own deportation campaign.

“During Operation Wetback, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives,” History.com wrote. “In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.”

When looking at how Trump and Vance are talking about Haitian migrants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, it’s clear that they’re aiming to foment the same hate that Eisenhower relied on to justify his own mass deportations. Willamette University history professor Seth Cotlar wrote on the social media platform Bluesky that the false claim about migrants eating pets was “like a beta test.”

The former president is piloting his anti-immigrant rhetoric elsewhere in addition to stoking unfounded fears in swing state cities. During a September rally in Uniondale, New York, Trump singled out immigrants from predominantly Black and Arab countries and insisted they were making life worse for communities like Uniondale. The ironic part of this is that in August, U.S. News & World Report ranked Nassau County, New York — which houses Uniondale — as the safest county in the United States.

“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world … we’re just destroying the fabric of our country,” Trump said. “You gotta get rid of these people. Give me a shot. You’ll have a safe New York within three months.”

If Trump wins a second term, he made it clear his mass deportation agenda will begin in Springfield, Ohio. This is despite the roughly 10,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield being in the country legally, under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation. Countries with TPS designations include nations going through large-scale turmoil, war, and widespread political violence, like Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen, among others.

Trump’s unique focus on Springfield suggests that the relatively small town of 58,000 could be a prototype for how Trump would use the vast powers of the federal government against immigrants across the country. First, a conspiracy theory about migrants spreads in far-right circles, which is then amplified on a national stage by MAGA-adjacent elected officials. Trump would then use that manufactured panic to justify deploying ICE agents and National Guard troops to round up migrants and detain them in sprawling camps to be deported en masse.

Mass deportations would harm both workers and democracy

Widespread deportations would not only require a tremendous expenditure of federal resources, but they would also deal a major blow to the U.S. economy. In August, the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy found that, of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, approximately eight million are of working age (between the ages of 25 and 54). 

The Carsey School found that, according to data from economists who have studied the effects of mass deportations in the past, it’s likely that should these migrants be suddenly deported, it would cause a severe shock to the national economy that would result in price increases and declining tax revenues. The resulting hit to national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would potentially cause another recession on par with the Great Recession of the late aughts, which the Federal Reserve estimates caused a 4.3% decline in GDP between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009.

“Future large-scale deportations have been estimated to reduce the size of the U.S. economy. Estimates of U.S. economic loss range from 2.6 to 6.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (the most widely used measure of national income,” the Carsey School’s Michael Lynch and Robert Ettlinger wrote. “At 2023 levels those equate to losses to the economy of between $711 billion and $1.7 trillion.”

New York Times staff columnist Jamelle Bouie noted that large sectors of the economy are heavily dependent on immigrant labor, including “the agricultural industry, hospitality, construction, and medical care.” He also reminded his followers on Bluesky that when pairing mass deportations with the steep tariffs Trump is proposing on imported goods, the detrimental economic impacts of his anti-immigrant policies would be exacerbated. 

Earlier this year, the former president suggested imposing tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese goods. The Brookings Institution’s Sanjay Patnaik told NPR in August that tariffs are “basically a tax on imported goods that come from abroad,” and that companies typically pass on higher tariffs to consumers in the form of higher prices. 

“Between mass deportation and massive tariffs Trump is running on a promise to, among other things, fly the American economy directly into the side of a mountain,” Bouie wrote.

But perhaps the most ominous part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda is what he would do with the anti-migrant infrastructure he plans to build after he’s succeeded in deporting millions of immigrants out of the country. If Miller’s speech to NRA members is any indicator, Trump wouldn’t stop at deporting undocumented immigrants. He mentioned that a second Trump administration could also include “people who were let in on visas but whose views, attitudes, and beliefs make them ineligible to stay in the country.”

“So the obvious example would be all of the Hamas supporters who are rallying across the country, who are here on various kinds of visas with the U.S. government,” Miller said, in reference to protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza on hundreds of college campuses in early 2024.

Trump himself has said that his deportation agenda would include pro-Palestinian protesters if he was elected to a second term. During a May meeting with wealthy donors in New York, the former president vowed to “set that movement back 35 or 30 years.” He appeared to not express concern about whether protesters’ immigration status was legal or not when singling them out for deportation.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” Trump said. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

Make no mistake: The demagoguery over Haitian immigrants in Ohio is just the beginning. If Trump is elected to a second term, no immigrant — regardless of their legal status — will be safe. Naturalized citizens may not be safe. And even native-born citizens will feel the blow of his policies in our bank accounts. Rather than being singled out for persecution, immigrants should be seen for what they are: Our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow Americans whose fortunes are intertwined with our own.

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.