SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, in part on a pledge to aggressively purge the small city of Springfield, Ohio, of its large Haitian immigrant population. To the president-elect, it doesn’t matter that the Haitian workers and families are there legally; he has vowed that “we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country — and we’re going to start with Springfield.”
In September — after Trump, his running mate J.D. Vance, and so many other Republicans spread racist lies about the city’s Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets — Rolling Stone visited Springfield, and found a city paralyzed by fear as its residents faced bomb threats and school evacuations. It got so bad that the city’s Republican mayor was practically begging Team Trump to stop demagoguing the Haitian residents during the tail-end of his campaign. After spending time with members of the Haitian community and their allies, one thing became clear: Trump hadn’t even won the election yet, but his blitz of racist terror on the small Ohio city was working. Many Haitians were suddenly afraid to be in public. Some felt the need to follow their children to and from school, out of concerns of violent retribution..
Now, Trump has won, with significant political backing in Clark County, where Springfield sits, and things have only gotten worse. When Rolling Stone returned to Springfield in recent days to meet with members of the Haitian community and support network, very few, if any, would allow their names to be printed in this story. There is widespread uncertainty about how much Trump will follow through on his promise to rid Springfield of its Haitian immigrants, which would involve, as Trump has publicly stated, stripping them of the federal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that allowed them to call Ohio their new home. There is, of course, pervasive fear and panic. There are lots of tears, and still enduring affection for a county, a state, and a nation that just resoundingly abandoned the Haitian immigrant community at the ballot box.
“He is coming for us,” one Haitian family man says. “We don’t want to leave. We love this place… It is home.”
While in Springfield, Rolling Stone was shown multiple group messages — some of which included hundreds of Haitians who flocked to the city — that had erupted in shock and horror on election night early this month. In the days since, these community threads were flooded with questions about what to do next. Some members shared information on “safe states” and cities — run by Democratic politicians who have pledged to resist the second Trump administration’s mass deportation plans — and some Haitians have suggested that they should flee now, before Trump is inaugurated next year. Some shared tips on how to emigrate from the United States, potentially to Canada. Others urged their Haitian friends to be extremely careful about whom they talk to, refrain from giving out private and personal information, and avoid talking about politics altogether. Several wondered what will happen to their kids.
Some of the information and best practices thrown into these group conversations centers on the roughly two-month sprint toward Inauguration Day 2025, and what Haitians should do to try to protect themselves before President Joe Biden leaves office. Several stressed that if any of the Haitian immigrants had not yet applied for asylum, they needed to do that now, now, now, now, as a possible insurance policy against Trump extinguishing or allowing the expiration of their temporary status.
In the days immediately following Trump’s 2024 victory, multiple families used these chats to inform their friends and neighbors that they weren’t waiting around to be hauled out by Trump’s forces — they had already left for a different city or a “safe” blue state. Some said they packed up their cars, and took their children and spouses, terrified about what the near future may hold. (Even before Trump’s win, a number of Haitians had already left, or were strongly weighing leaving, citing concern for their loved ones’ safety.)
Other members of these large group discussions pleaded: Please come back. Stay here with the community that loves and supports you, and we will find a way forward. We will protect you.
It’s unclear if any of these families will return. Rolling Stone spoke to one parent who fled in the wake of Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris. This parent says they and their family were scared and felt they had no choice but to flee. Like so many other Haitians in the area have said, it pained them to leave. They have friends they love in Springfield. They’d come to adore the city and their neighbors, even when the now-most powerful person on the planet put a target on their backs and tried to turn the entire country against them.
This parent had to do what they thought was best for their family, and that meant sparing them — they hope — from Trump’s coming wrath. They say they were heartbroken.
The fright and flight that is rippling through Springfield’s Haitian immigrant community is, in fact, the point of so much of Trump and his lieutenants’ draconian program to deport migrants and cut off immigration.
According to various sources familiar with the matter and Trump transition officials, there are members of the president-elect’s inner circle who are convinced that the new administration won’t be able to hit Trump’s goal of millions in deportations. Regardless, Trump and his anti-immigration ideologues — particularly incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller — will certainly try to go as big as possible, and plan to take a chainsaw to both legal and illegal immigration to the U.S.
But in conjunction with any new policy or radically expanded deportation regime — which Trump says he’s prepared to ramp up using the U.S. military — there’s another factor that the president-elect and his apparatchiks are counting on: creating a climate of sustained fear and dread that they hope will do much of their work for them, whether or not they ultimately deport the many millions that Trump repeatedly says he wants to expel.
Trump advisers, as well as other Republican sources who’ve recently discussed immigration policy with the president-elect, say that creating a massive propaganda drumbeat — via traditional media, right-wing media, and the federal government’s communications apparatus — during the presidential transition and in the opening weeks of Trump’s new term will be, as one Trump adviser describes, “essential” to making undocumented immigrants consider leaving the U.S. preemptively, and dissuading people who may want to come to America on Trump’s watch.
These Trump advisers and allies say that if the president-elect is going to mount anything close to the history-making scale of deportations that he, Vance, and other elite conservatives have been promising, it is something the administration is going to have to build up to over time. Creating a culture of fear and intimidation is key, especially in the interim, to the crackdown — and some of Trump’s brass have been telegraphing that throughout the presidential campaign.
“As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now. You’re damn right… You’re going home,” former Trump administration official Tom Homan — who the president-elect has now appointed as his new “border czar” — said on-stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Katie Kersh, an immigration attorney based in Dayton, Ohio, says she and her colleagues have been in Springfield regularly, conducting legal clinics and presentations for the Haitian immigrants. She says that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 win, “People are really scared. I think a lot of the Haitians are concerned that their rights will be violated. We are right now trying to make sure that people understand their rights, and allay their fears that they’ll be on a plane back to Haiti on Jan. 21, which is not how the law works.”
This past Sunday, Kersh says she helped lead a know-your-rights presentation at a church, where her legal group received many questions from the Haitians in attendance:
“What if we get deported before our hearings?”
“What happens to my children if I’m deported?”
“How can I get a passport for my child if I need to leave the United States quickly, so I don’t have to leave my child here?”
“Can I apply for asylum if I have TPS?”
“Can Trump really cancel TPS?”
She says that there have been “a lot of questions about being stopped by state police, including highway patrol.” The attorney continues, “This is going to be a time when people’s due process rights are threatened, and it’s important that, as a country, we stick up for and defend these people in any way we can. In my conversations with the dozens of people we see at the clinics every week, and Haitian community leaders, and people who come up to ask me questions, it seems like a lot of immigrants… feel that the country doesn’t want them here.”
Kersh adds, ”People who care about what’s happening need to show up for these individuals, even if it’s not in their immediate community, to show that that’s not the case.”
Existing alongside the heartbreak, and the severe anxiety about Trump’s reascension to power, are shows of incredible solidarity within the Haitian community and among their friends and allies. When Rolling Stone visited Springfield two months ago, this reporter spent time at the local welcome center for St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic social services nonprofit serving the city’s poor, including many Haitian immigrants.
At the time, when asked what she would say to Ohio Sen. Vance if he were sitting in front of her, Casey Rollins, the executive director of the Springfield District Council of St. Vincent de Paul, replied: “You admittedly continue to encourage untruths and to provoke hatred among us all; politically posturing, and pawning Springfield for political gain. It is hurting all of Ohio, the nation, and our world; not just Springfield and the Haitians who are here with us. I wonder how that makes anyone in Springfield safer or more stable than we were yesterday?”
Last week, Rolling Stone went back to that welcome center and saw that the nonprofit, including its Haitian volunteers, was still busy helping Haitian immigrants and workers fill out different types of paperwork, regardless of what happens after Trump gets sworn into office.
In the corner of the center, one young Haitian girl was flipping through a children’s book and playing with a small, blonde doll. She wasn’t bothering anyone or hurting anyone in any way. Yet, she is, to the President Trumps of the world, a quintessential example of someone who should be easily demagogued for electoral gain, rounded up, and purged from our country.
Trump won promising exactly that. His second inauguration in Washington, D.C., is two months away.
