From Hateful Hoax to Presidential Policy
As time runs out for Haitian refugees in the U.S., a look back at JD Vance’s sick, racist lie about immigrants eating pets.
THE CLOCK IS TICKING FOR HAITIAN REFUGEES, hundreds of thousands of whom are likely to lose their Temporary Protected Status in two weeks, now that the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a green light to end protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals. The work permits of Haitians with TPS expire today, making it illegal for them to be employed. While their absence from the workforce will likely be most keenly felt in Florida and other states with major eldercare needs, the issue also has particular resonance in Springfield, Ohio, the site of a sick hoax implicating Haitian migrants in stealing and eating pet cats—a story boosted by Donald Trump and especially JD Vance, whose tweet mentioning reports that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country” got over 11 million views and nearly 100,000 likes.
Those “reports” were thoroughly disproved almost immediately (a week after the debate, the Wall Street Journal ran a comprehensive report on how the Trump campaign promoted sensational claims that local Republican officials had told them were false). Yet in recent weeks, right-wing accounts on X have once again been recycling the pet-eating hoax, claiming that the story was never debunked but simply unconfirmed, and that even if the Haitians in Springfield weren’t eating cats, they were definitely eating ducks and geese from the city parks.
Even a photo of a black man carrying a dead Canadian goose has popped up again as supposed confirmation—even though it was taken in Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield, and showed a man (who may or may not have been an immigrant) removing two dead geese that had been hit by a car.
While these attempts to revive the racist hoax have not gained much traction, the story is still worth revisiting—both because it’s a particularly vile slander against a community that is especially vulnerable right now and because the bad-faith players involved have yet to take responsibility for promoting the lie. Vance defended his role in this sorry tale by explaining that he had to “create stories” to get the media to notice the plight of small-town Americans allegedly suffering from the influx of migrants. (He didn’t quite admit the falsehood, asserting that he had relied on “firsthand” accounts by his Ohio constituents.) Culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who tried to back up the Springfield hoax with a (highly dubious) report on an African immigrant supposedly barbecuing cats in a different city in Ohio, also stuck to his guns in his recent interview on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast.
I WITNESSED THE BEGINNINGS of the cat hoax on X on September 7, 2024, when I posted a sarcastic comment on Naomi Wolf’s sharing of a post by the far-right “End Wokeness” account about “ducks and pets” in Springfield being eaten by Haitian migrants “shipped” to the town by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Besides the above-mentioned photo of the man carrying dead geese, the “evidence” consisted of an anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her Haitian neighbors carving up her lost cat.
The story had already become a magnet for white supremacists, and my replies quickly filled with racist and antisemitic attacks of which “Always Jews protecting these creatures” was among the least offensive.
The racist social media storm was no accident. As TalkingPointsMemo documented, the cat-eating hoax was the latest in a far-right campaign targeting Springfield’s Haitian migrants. Neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups were among the participants, including Patriot Front, which got some attention the other day with its July Fourth march in Washington, D.C. Its mask-wearing members showed up in Springfield on September 1, 2024, protesting “the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants.” Three weeks earlier, about a dozen people from a group called Blood Tribe had marched through downtown Springfield waving swastika flags; the march leader, Drake Berentz, referred to the Haitians as “subhumans” and “degenerate Third Worlders.” Berentz also took the microphone at the August 27, 2024 meeting of the Springfield city commission meeting, using a fake name that contained a barely veiled racial slur, and warned that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” He quickly got ejected after appearing to threaten commission members.
A local Republican activist who vented anti-Haitian grievances at Springfield city commission meetings on July 30 and August 13, 2024, Glenda Bailey, sounded like prime Patriot Front material. Bailey not only asserted that “Haitians are occupiers in Springfield, and taxpaying citizens have become their economic slaves,” but accused “leftist whites” and the NAACP of seeking the replacement and “extinction” of “Springfield’s white population” as part of a global assault on “white countries and communities.” In her words, “Great Britain is a police state for whites, literal white genocide is happening in South Africa, and white countries are losing their ethnic identities.”1
As the cat-eating hoax turned into a national controversy in September, the Springfield city commission meetings that became forums for such grievances were mined for evidence that, while the kitty-on-the-grill story may have been bogus, the bad behavior of Haitians in Springfield—including the killing and eating of waterfowl from the city park—was amply attested by put-upon locals. “All the claims at city council meetings of wild animals being killed and eaten from regular citizens both black and white are inherently credible,” Wesley Yang, a formerly serious essayist turned “anti-woke” crank, asserted on X. In particular, people seized on a clip that showed a black Springfield resident, Anthony Harris, asserting that “Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off . . . and eating them”: The fact that a black man was saying this presumably defused accusations of racism.
But Harris, a YouTube troll, was not a reliable witness: In a subsequent profanity-laced interview in which he sounded somewhat taken aback by the media attention, he made it clear that he was referring to “a rumor going about the city,” not something he had witnessed firsthand.2 In fact, it’s pretty clear that none of the people who testified about the Haitians’ alleged wildlife-poaching offered any eyewitness testimony. What some of them did offer was rhetoric straight out of the Blood Tribe playbook. One woman who accused the migrants of “making some barbaric stew out of the birds that live in our park” also described them as “pests” and said they were “living their life here the way they did in Haiti: angry, stealing, polluting, living in filth, and acting like animals.” (The TPM investigation found that the woman wasn’t even a Springfield resident.)
An August 26, 2024 police call in Springfield about Haitians allegedly snatching geese at the park, dug up by the Federalist in a desperate attempt to corroborate the hoax, was most likely a product of the same racist rumor mill. The caller repeatedly focused on the alleged offenders’ ethnicity (“a group of Haitian people, there was about four of ’em”) and claimed that he managed to hear them speaking Creole despite driving by in such a hurry that he wasn’t able to get the perps’ full license plate number, only the last four digits. The police investigation came up empty.
Other attempts to validate the story of Haitian cat-eaters (or is it waterfowl-eaters?) in Springfield were even more bizarre and dishonest. Notorious misinformation peddler Ian Miles Cheong posted a police bodycam clip of an Ohio woman “arrested for eating someone’s pet cat” and claimed that she was Haitian. This supposed corroboration was cited by serious MAGA-aligned pundits like Yang and Will Reilly—even after people pointed out that the incident happened in Canton, Ohio, some 175 miles away from Springfield. The woman, who was mentally ill, was later confirmed to be a Canton native with no connection to Haiti.
Meanwhile, Chris Rufo entered the fray with an offer:
On September 14, Rufo triumphantly reported that “migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio,” as confirmed by “multiple witnesses.” This “find” was quickly boosted by Vance as vindication.
The catch? The “cat eaters of Ohio,” allegedly filmed barbecuing two stray cats on a grill a few months earlier, were not in Springfield but in Dayton, some twenty-six miles away, and were not Haitians but immigrants from Rwanda. In fact, it’s far from clear that the fuzzy video showed cats: Many thought they were chickens. The police in Dayton disputed the allegations, as did a subsequent report by Jacqueline Sweet for Drop Site News; when Sweet interviewed the supposed witnesses—people living next door to the supposed cat eaters, who had since moved away—they strongly denied having told Rufo’s associate anything about the Rwandans hunting cats. The mother of the man who filmed the video did tell Sweet that she believed the Africans were grilling cats because she once saw them killing an animal with hatchets on the sidewalk; but she couldn’t say what animal it was or whether it was being killed for food. (Dayton residents have reported sightings of, and some attacks by, foxes and coyotes.)
LEAVING ASIDE what may or may not have happened in Dayton, the story of the Haitian cat-eaters of Springfield collapsed completely within eight days of Trump’s infamous “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” riff in his September 10, 2024 debate with Kamala Harris. The woman who made that Facebook post about someone’s cat being killed and eaten by Haitians deleted it and apologized, saying that it was based on rumors and that she had no idea it was going to explode the way it did. The Springfield woman who called the police about a missing cat and worried that it might have ended up as lunch for her Haitian neighbors—a report cited as evidence by JD Vance—also apologized after finding the feline alive and unharmed in her basement.
Moreover, it turned out that Vance mentioned this report after being told by the Springfield city manager that it was baseless. Apparently, Vance’s Christian conversion never got to the “Thou shalt not bear false witness” part.
While all of this may sound comical, the real-life consequences were anything but: Springfield was terrorized by bomb threats that forced the closure of school and public buildings. (MAGA pundits Megyn Kelly and Ayaan Hirsi Ali dismissed them as fakes by the left, naturally.)
The bomb threats targeting the Haitians in Springfield resumed earlier this year after a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration couldn’t strip them of their protected status—the ruling overturned a few days ago by the Supreme Court.
Local politicians, including Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine, have not only expressed dismay at the Haitian migrants being sent back into a perilous situation but credited them with helping spur an economic revitalization in the area. It’s also true that their arrival has placed a strain on social services, including the community health clinic and translation services—an issue that, as it happens, was explored in a New York Times story several days before JD Vance supposedly felt compelled to “create stories” to get the media to notice these problems.
But there is no question that, whatever problems may exist in Springfield, the cat-eating story was grotesquely false and vile. Ironically, the attempts to vindicate it citing Rufo’s report from Dayton is pretty strong evidence that it was a specifically racist hoax: The only connection between Haitian migrants in Springfield and Rwandan migrants in Dayton is that both groups are black.
And if, as seems inevitable, the Haitians targeted by this lie are slated for deportation and targeted by ICE, the racist hoaxers will have won.
Bailey also made a transparent allusion to the well-worn white nationalist trope of Jewish hypocrisy on immigration: “Should Israel be forced to accept a new majority population of Africans?” Israel does, in fact, welcome black Jewish migrants from Africa.
The only mentions of Haitians on Anthony Harris’s X account are complaints about bad driving.
Thank you for this comprehensive account. We in Ohio are waiting with dread to see what the end of Haitian TPS will mean for us and our neighbors.
The point of saying this was never to actually communicate a factual truth about what was happening on the ground in Springfield, Ohio. The point was to communicate the emotional message “Haitians are disgusting, and you should be disgusted by them, the same way you would be disgusted by someone who killed and ate your housepet.” This is why J.D. Vance could admit that he was lying to the media and pay no price with his voters: because his voters already knew it wasn’t true, they just liked Vance saying it because it told them Vance emotionally agreed with them about his own constituents.