Terror Returns to Springfield

In 2024, the Trump campaign, spurred in part by vice presidential candidate JD Vance, pursued a campaign of terror against Springfield, Ohio. Home to fewer than 60,000 people, Springfield had in recent years seen a large influx of Haitian immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who filled jobs that the local population did not fill themselves. Vance spread the most ridiculous and overtly racist rumors imaginable, claiming without evidence that the Haitians were eating their neighbors’ cats. Trump reacted to the backlash against Vance’s comments by doubling up, using the presidential debate to engage in his own explicitly racist rant, specifically against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio.

The result was weeks of harassment and bomb threats from Trump’s MAGA fans, threats that disrupted the lives of the Haitian community and other Springfield residents alike.

I will never forget this episode, the ugliest moment in the ugliest campaign of my lifetime. They attempted to spark what amounted to a pogrom in a small city, a city run by their own party, in a state run by their own party, and there were no consequences for it whatsoever. The seventy-seven million Americans who voted for Trump either did not care, somehow failed to notice the campaign’s most widely repeated talking points for several weeks, or actively liked what Vance and Trump were doing to Springfield.

Now that those Americans have put Trump in the White House again, we have seen the administration use the tools of the federal government to pursue terror campaigns more directly. They have done it in LA, Chicago, DC, Memphis, New Orleans, and Portland through a series of high-profile federal operations. They have spread terror across the state of Maine. They have mounted their largest occupation ever in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, one that continues with no clear end in sight. And now, it seems, they are returning to Springfield.

Springfield is a testament to the folly of the entire reactionary worldview. During the terror campaign in 2024, Governor DeWine—an avowedly pro-Trump figure—went so far as to acknowledge that the town’s “resurgence in manufacturing and job creation” is “thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.”

“They are there legally,” he insisted, correctly. “They are there to work.”

The town’s underpaid, part-time mayor also pushed back on the Trump campaign at the time, although he had flirted with xenophobia on Fox News earlier in the year, before the chickens came home to roost. Even officials like him, and DeWine, can see that towns like Springfield need immigrants in order to avoid the fate of so many stagnant, rust-belt cities.

And so now the governor, and the mayor, and the School Superintendent must all prepare for the man-made disaster that is likely to befall them when the Haitian immigrants’ TPS status is allowed to expire on February 3rd. Superintendent Bob Hill told school staff that the “district will handle” any complications with DHS, and that they shouldn’t “attempt to interpret immigration matters,” meaning, presumably, not to contradict DHS agents’ on-the-spot judgments. Hill also said that DHS agents would have to follow the established processes for getting access to schools—a comment that sounds more like a wish than a statement of fact.

We know all too well how DHS comports itself in what is effectively occupied territory. They will storm any school they wish, at any time they wish. Outnumbered and overawed staff and city officials will not do a thing about it, and their impunity will not end with schools. They will break into homes without warrants, disrupt restaurants and retail stores during business hours, and just generally behave more like a roving band of hooligans than a law enforcement agency.

There are glimmerings that the resistance infrastructure that was built and mobilized in Minneapolis is coming together in Springfield as well. At minimum, church groups have begun to prepare humanitarian measures for impacted families. As Amanda Becker at The 19th writes:

Late last week, word came from the office of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine that it was time to “activate the churches,” as one leader of a faith-based organization put it — in other words, to prepare to provide emergency care and short-term housing to children separated from their parents. Amy Willmann at the Nehemiah Foundation, a local group named for a biblical figure said to have restored Jerusalem, was tapped as the point person. She said their network has 28 churches and 114 volunteers who have already completed background checks. These volunteers will staff “hubs” where children can go if they arrive home from school to an empty house or are taken in by child services once a parent is picked up by ICE. DeWine, a term-limited Republican in his final year in office, has pledged additional support from the state.

DeWine has asked church groups to prepare for a catastrophe that will be brought down upon his state entirely at the whim of the president and vice president.

I’m afraid that is just where we are as a country. Congressional Republicans could stop this at any time. The Supreme Court could stop this at any time. But they won’t. And that, more than Trump’s willingness to use federal forces to invade our own cities, is the real crux of the problem we now face.

Featured image is Las Camas de la Muerte, by Francisco Goya