Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been told to “stay away” from Ohio.
Journalist and contributor Ray Marcano wrote in an opinion piece for The Columbus Dispatch that Trump and his choice for vice president should not visit the city of Springfield after the former president claimed immigrants had taken to eating family pets.
“Donald Trump says he wants to visit Springfield soon. No, he shouldn’t. He should stay away,” Marcano wrote. “Trump and his sidekick, our manipulative Ohio Senator JD Vance, have spent the last two weeks spreading and amplifying vicious lies about the Haitian community eating cats and dogs.”
The city came to prominence recently after Trump claimed that Haitian migrants are “eating cats and dogs” there during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” he said at the debate hosted in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Donald Trump (left) and Senator JD Vance in New York City on September 11, 2024. A journalist has said the Republican nominees should stay away from Ohio following their claims that immigrants were eating families’ pets.
Adam GRAY / AFP/GETTY
Since then, Trump has said he plans to visit the city “in the next two weeks.”
Marcano said that a visit from Trump “would be like rubbing sandpaper covered with salt on an open wound,” and that he would “continue to dehumanize the Haitian community, just like this country vilified the Germans and Italians in the early 1900s, Asians during WWII, and now any brown-skinned immigrant, whether they be from South America or the Caribbean.”
“What would hurt most of all is seeing Trump in Springfield, being cheered on by his supporters while Haitians have to explain to their children why a man who aspires to be the leader of the free world hates their people so,” he wrote.
Springfield Mayor Rob Rue has said a campaign visit from either political candidate this election could be concerning.
“The amount of attention that’s on Springfield right now, it feels very hot in Springfield,” he said. “I would be concerned with either candidate visiting our community.”
Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, wrote in The New York Times that it was disappointing that “Springfield has become the epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy, because it has long been a community of great diversity.”
He credited Haitian immigrants, who have flocked to the city in recent years under the Immigration Parole Program and remained legally under Temporary Protected Status, with a boom in “manufacturing and job creation.”
“Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs,” he wrote.
“As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” he said. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”
