A Season of Death and Fear
From nervous Haitians in Ohio to a grieving family in Texas, the real-world effects of Trump’s assault on immigrants.
A report this morning from the Navigator polling outfit contains new data from a national survey on attitudes toward the 2026 FIFA World Cup and U.S. viewership. It confirms that our enthusiasm at Bulwark HQ for the World Cup doesn’t make us oddballs. As of June 30, nearly half of Americans had watched a World Cup game, with more planning to watch as the tournament continues. And the numbers are the same for Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan enthusiasm for globalization, ftw!
So enjoy today’s and tomorrow’s games—and next week’s semifinals and final. Happy Friday.
The Quiet Before the Assault
by Jim Swift
Springfield, Ohio
You’d think this town would be on the verge of panic.
It’s not. At least, not in public.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe two weeks ago paved the way for the Trump administration to deport from the United States perhaps hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, I came here to observe a rally for the city and its Haitian community and gauge the mood. It was somber but not despondent. But with today marking an important deadline—it’s the day on which work authorization under Temporary Protected Status is set to expire for refugees from Haiti and Syria—and the prospect of mass deportation drawing closer, I was curious to see if that mood had changed. How were people here adjusting to the fact that Springfield, which had built a future with its Haitian community, now has to wait to learn whether Washington will succeed in undoing it?
The people of Springfield—like many other cities across the country—now have to make some very difficult decisions. With those TPS work permits expiring today, employers will now have to choose between firing longtime employees or violating federal law.
And the temporary Ohio drivers licenses issued for those under TPS already expired earlier this week—which means that driving, for many of those people, is now illegal, and an easy way to get caught by DHS.
I visited the local branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity dedicated to aid for the poor. Its thrift store is the engine for the organization’s community support hub next door, in a dated building with computer stations visible from the outside.
I noticed that the parking lot seemed pretty empty for a Wednesday afternoon. A multilingual sign explains the limit of items per customer in the free food pantry. I heard an employee named Chuck describe to the cashier what donations had just come in, as he lugged peanut butter and other goods toward the shelves.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has longstanding ties to both Springfield and Haiti, told the local press earlier this week that the local Saint Vincent de Paul council was working to secure U.S. passports for the U.S.-born children of the Haitians here, as they are, without a doubt, U.S. citizens.
“A lot of great work has been done by a lot [of] good people in Springfield to help them do that,” DeWine said, emphasizing not only how good Ohio has been to these Haitians but how good the Haitians have been for Ohio. The surge of immigrants—estimated at upwards of 10,000—to Springfield from the earthquake-racked and violence-riddled Caribbean country was successfully absorbed thanks in large part to the local faith community and its charities.
That is, until 2024, when Donald Trump and JD Vance helped spread vile lies about Springfield’s Haitians supposedly eating their neighbors’ pets. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church told me in February, “We [Springfield] typically get twenty . . . inquiries a year from businesses looking for a place to locate. We have not had a single one since the ‘cats and dogs’ comment.”
I visited with Rick, a Bulwark reader who has spent years walking alongside Springfield families during some of the most important moments of their lives, both in his day job in public health and in his faith community. That experience has given him a close view of the anxiety many are feeling.
Rick has counted the Haitians under TPS as both friends and neighbors. He’s learned a little French along the way, but told me that Springfield’s Haitians are “working really hard to assimilate and to learn the language and to do all the things that we so often say we expect of people.”
“They really want to be a part of a community,” Rick said, as we grabbed lunch at Charlo’s, a restaurant downtown.
He worried about biased news sources distorting people’s impressions of Springfield’s Haitians. “It’s hard to hear misinformation, knowing it’s harming people that I’ve met and have come to love,” he said. “We’re so isolated from each other. I feel like I can tell from day to day what news source people are watching.”
It’s not just the news media. The White House publishes its own alien-themed, error-laden website that the Ohio Immigrant Alliance says “creates a false impression of actual criminal activity.”
Some of the city’s Haitians have already been withdrawing from public life, stopping their attendance at church, or not appearing at work, according to people I interviewed. It’s not immediately clear if they’re staying home, like so many others across the United States from different communities fearing imminent deportation, or if they’ve left Ohio for other states, hoping to avoid the special scrutiny on this once-hopeful town. Thanks to the controversy over the Haitians in Springfield in particular—which, again, didn’t appear over more than a decade of immigration and assimilation, and really only exploded due to Trump and Vance’s agitation—the town has had to deal with bomb threats (mostly from abroad, it turns out), with school closures, hospital lockdowns, and general chaos.
The financial cost to Springfield if the city sees mass firings of its Haitian workers, let alone mass deportations conducted by DHS, will likely be hefty. According to one estimate, Ohio’s Haitian population has an economic output of $160 million per year, and contributes nearly $40 million in local, state, and federal taxes.
DeWine has stated that if DHS chooses to act, the state will get advance notice, and will not interfere. “We will do what the law tells us to do. We respect the law in Ohio.”
Nobody knows exactly what’s coming. But Rick is hopeful as we consider whether we’re dining in the last rays of this town’s latest golden age.
“I’m always hopeful,” he muses. I’m not sure it’ll thrive in the same way. . . . I just wonder if it won’t be what it could have been.”
As we prepared to head our separate ways, Rick brought up a song, “The Change” by Garth Brooks. He has returned to its message “again and again” in recent days. He remembered it coming out after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the images felt hopeless: rescue workers pulling people from the rubble.
“The chorus of the song says, ‘You’ll never change things. And no matter what you do, it’s still the same thing. But it’s not the world that I am changing. I do this so this world we know never changes me.’”
He paused for a moment before going on. “It does feel like the world is trying to overwhelm you. But we keep returning . . . not because we think we’re going to change anything, but because hopefully it won’t change us.”
The Coverup Unravels
by Bill Kristol
The coverup of Tuesday’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in Houston seems to be coming apart.
First we had the totally unsubstantiated ICE claim—so often a lie when we’ve heard it from ICE in the past—that Araujo had “weaponized his vehicle.” And we had the normal ICE stonewalling—a refusal to release any actual information about what happened or to cooperate with local law enforcement.
Then we learned that the ICE officers had taken Lorenzo’s personal property from him, including his wallet and phone, before putting him in the ambulance to a hospital. Which is why he was admitted as a John Doe and the hospital couldn’t notify his family that he was there. But the indecency here isn’t the point. Buying time to organize a coverup was.
Then we learned that ICE thought Araujo was someone else when they tried to stop his work truck. ICE seems to have put out this piece of information themselves, perhaps figuring that some routine incompetence was a better story for the media to focus on than their malevolence.
Then we learned that ICE was doing its best to ensure the full story wouldn’t come out. Greg Sargent of the New Republic reported that the three people who were in the car with Araujo when the shooting took place and who remained in ICE’s custody were under pressure from ICE to sign self-deportation orders, presumably so they would be out of the country and less available to talk about what happened.
These three men have resisted the pressure and have courageously spoken out about what happened that Tuesday morning. It’s worth quoting at some length a Washington Post report from late last night:
The three men who were arrested during an immigration operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction. . . . They spoke from immigration detention with attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with The Washington Post.
DHS released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo had rammed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”
“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over. . . . There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
Balderas-Ibarra spoke to Rojas, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43, and the shooting victim’s brother, Victor Salgado, 44, and said he heard the same story from each as he interviewed them separately. The men are not being housed together, the attorney said. . . . “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”
[After being shot by an agent] Salgado Araujo was able to stop the van and place it in park, the men said, but the officer or officers continued to unload additional rounds from the sides of the vehicle.
Rojas described the agents violently pulling Salgado Araujo out of the driver seat and throwing him to the ground. They put handcuffs on their wrists and feet.
Victor Salgado said his brother was yelling for help as he was bleeding out.
The three men lay helpless as their boss lay dying.
“Se querían escapar, verdad?” Victor Salgado recalled an ICE agent saying to him in a mocking tone. He relayed that memory to Balderas-Ibarra. “You wanted to escape, right?”
None of the ICE agents involved has been identified. None has stepped forward to contradict the witnesses’ account. No video or witness accounts or evidence of any sort has been provided by ICE.
Body cameras could help resolve who’s telling the truth, you say? Well, it turns out that the ICE officers were not wearing bodycams that morning.
It’s horrifying. Surely it’s not too much to ask Democratic members of Congress to make cooperation on any issue—whether procedural or substantive, whether an appropriation or a confirmation—contingent on getting at the truth of what happened here, and on some accountability for this atrocity.
AROUND THE BULWARK
From Hateful Hoax to Presidential Policy… As time runs out for Haitian refugees in the U.S., CATHY YOUNG takes a look back at JD Vance’s sick, racist lie about immigrants eating pets.
Trump’s Own Judge Torched DOJ’s Insane Election Subpoena… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss a big week in legal news: DOJ’s stunning concession in a reporter’s lawsuit over the Epstein files, the questions senators must make Todd Blanche answer at his confirmation hearing, and the Trump-appointed judge who torched DOJ’s demand for the names of every 2020 election worker in Fulton County.
Trump, Platner, and the Mistake America Keeps Making… On the latest Mona Charen Show, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to analyze the Platner saga and have a few words about the World Cup.
The Endangered Big Screen Comedy… SONNY BUNCH reviews The Invite and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, and is joined by renowned film historian DAVID THOMSON on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss how the screen has changed us.
Ravelstein Revisited… Saul Bellow’s last novel is brilliant, funny, and unsettling, JONATHAN MARKS writes. It also leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: What exactly did all that shamelessness buy us?
Quick Hits
THIS GUY: Graham Platner appears intent on running out every last second of his time in the political spotlight. The populist Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine announced Wednesday night that he was dropping his bid following reports that he had allegedly sexually assaulted an ex-girlfriend. But a video announcement saying you plan to leave the race is not the same as officially leaving the race. To do that, one needs to send in actual paperwork to the Maine secretary of state. According to press reports and his top aide, Platner is going to file that paperwork. But he’s apparently going to wait until Monday to do so. That is the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race; were he to miss it, Democrats would lose the ability to run someone else on the party line for the Senate.
Technically, Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to file the paperwork. He must also formally withdraw from the race by submitting a signed written notice to the elections office. But fret not: He doesn’t need to hitch a ride on an oyster boat or call an Uber to Augusta. According to the secretary of state’s office, the paperwork can be submitted without appearing in person.
THAT GUY: A new report from the New York Times chronicles how local officials in the Sunshine State put a stop to Gov. DeSantis’s proposal to significantly reduce property taxes in the state.
In a speech last year, DeSantis was quoted as saying: “You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year just for the privilege of living on your own private property. Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?”
The idea of steeply cutting property taxes—which would take away a key source of funding for schools, fire departments, and other services in local communities across the state—is just the latest illustration of a larger movement among some conservatives to shift taxes away from income and property and toward consumption exclusively. Some even want to eliminate federal income taxes altogether in exchange for a national sales tax.
Were Florida’s proposal to go through, local leaders could find themselves in a position where they feel they must either go to the state shaking a tin cup or make cuts to essential services like police. DeSantis wants to offer those communities “grants.” But local Republicans like Jeff Brandes, a former state senator who now runs a think tank, saw right through that suggestion: “This was a pitch that started off as cutting taxes, but I don’t think it’s that anymore. I think it’s really shifted to control.”
DeSantis is now distancing himself from the measure, saying he would still vote in favor of it but likely won’t campaign for it.
Cheap Shots
If you are worried about crime caused by immigrants, there's no better way to increase it than by systematically cutting off their legal means of earning a living.
I’m not going to live long enough to see Miller die of old age, but I’m hopeful that I’ll see him go to federal prison.