SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — It’s not about the cats and dogs.
Nearly everyone in this Ohio town agrees the crisis circling it existed long before former President Donald Trump amplified rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating pets, generating national headlines. The locals also almost universally believe the migrants are not the villains of this story.
I arrive in this otherwise forgotten Rust Belt city the same day the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), defended his boss for spreading the cat-eating rumor during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
While the Springfield residents maintain that local waterfowl and pets have indeed gone mysteriously missing in recent months, none who I spoke to could corroborate the more outlandish suggestion that the Haitian migrants relocated to their town were actually eating cats and dogs. And yet, most I talked to agreed with Vance. If it took an unproven rumor to get the public to pay attention to the tragedy of Springfield, most residents agreed: So be it.
Sympathy for the migrants
“I can’t put it all on the Haitians,” said a young woman standing outside the alley that has become a local haunt for hundreds of the city’s homeless. “The government has to take responsibility as well because, ultimately, it comes to our government.”
Marie, as she’s requested to be called since her homeless shelter has threatened to evict residents who speak to the press, and her 1-year-old daughter Emme have been on the waiting list for city-sponsored housing since January. In that time, the city voted to cut more than $1 million in federal funding to Homefull, the homeless shelter where Marie, Emme, and 21 other families made up of women and children lived. When the city voted to shut down the shelter in August, Commissioner Tracey Tackett blamed its lack of space for single men, designating continued funding of the shelter for women and children as suboptimal for the “greater good.”
Marie and Emme now live in Sheltered Inc., a shelter that is only open for half the day, the rest of which she spends mostly on the streets to escape the chaos and, she alleges, bug infestations and violence.
“We come sit out here because we can’t deal with all that,” says Marie. “I’m not going to keep my baby inside when other kids are beating her up and getting away with it. Four- or 5-, 6-year-old kids trying to beat up on a little 1-year-old. Their parents don’t do nothing. The workers don’t do nothing. But yet, when I try to defend my baby, I get threatened to get kicked out.”
Kenneth Seeling, better known as “Barron” in the community, is the local pastor and homeless advocate who takes me to these shanty steps, where he brings dozens of burgers to feed the homeless multiple times a week. We see men and women, black and white, and even one homeless man, who goes by “Heavy,” get picked up by a local for day labor.
“But you will never see a homeless Haitian,” Barron said. Demetrius, another young homeless mother who was also forced out of Homefull while spending the better part of a year on the housing waitlist, said only one Haitian family has waited as long as she and Marie have. The rest have been quickly put up, often at an astounding financial windfall, a far more salacious detail than anything involving cats and dogs.
The federal government’s role
The story began just before an armed gang of foreign mercenaries murdered the Haitian president in a coup attempt that destabilized the already tumultuous Caribbean country into utter chaos. By executive fiat in May 2021, President Joe Biden exempted Haitians illegally in the U.S. from deportation by granting the country’s citizens with Temporary Protected Status. At the time of the White House’s announcement, then-Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who would go from chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to a federal corruption criminal conviction, estimated that TPS would protect some 150,000 Haitians already residing in the U.S. unlawfully. Since Biden assumed office, another half a million Haitians have entered the U.S. on top of the 10 million illegal migrant entries recorded by the federal government.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) flew 49 Venezuelan migrants into the 23,000-person town of Martha’s Vineyard, Biden branded the move “a political stunt and inhumane.” With 58,000 residents, Springfield is only 2 1/2 times the size, yet with estimates of up to 20,000 Haitians now residing in the town, Springfield has received more than 1,000 times as many Haitians as Martha’s Vineyard received Venezuelans. While all but five of the 49 migrants spent fewer than 48 hours in Martha’s Vineyard, the Haitians in Springfield are largely here to stay.
“Honestly, if it weren’t for the driving, nobody ever would have noticed” the influx, said city resident Mark Houseman. Most of the Haitians I observed in the city seem perfectly pleasant and law-abiding, and, thanks to taxpayer largesse, gainfully employed. But car crashes resulting in injuries are up 14% this year, with fatal car crashes quadrupling over last year and repeat offenders in traffic records often from the same households of multiple Haitians. The sheer number of Haitians living in strictly zoned properties calls into question the largest mystery undergirding Springfield: Who exactly is responsible for bringing some 20,000 Haitians to this tiny town to begin with?
Follow the money
Philomene Philostin came to Springfield because of her ministry. A naturalized American citizen who has lived in the country for decades, Philostin now serves as a community mentor, overseeing her church congregation as a youth pastor and her young staff at her local market in the city. But many Haitians in the city are employed through contracts negotiated by First Diversity Staffing, a hiring agency that has long partnered with the city of Springfield.
Because Haitians with TPS are eligible for federally funded benefits, such as food stamps and Medicaid, First Diversity can create collective contracts between companies like Dole and hundreds of Haitians at below-market wages. This is borne out both by multiple sources in the city and in the data: Clark County Haitians on Medicaid have more than doubled in just the past year, while Springfield wage growth has collapsed even as wage growth in nearby Dayton actually outpaces the national average. Meanwhile, the Zillow Observed Rent Index in Springfield has risen twice as fast as the national average.
First Diversity is among the biggest winners. The company has long boasted that it supplies transportation to its employees, but less well known is that the company’s CEO, George Ten, owns at least 48 properties through Ten Enterprises. Using a number of addresses publicly listed by the Clark County auditor, the Washington Examiner can confirm that some of these properties house Haitians employed by First Diversity.
In other words, one man with a long relationship with the city government is being paid by migrants to house them in properties he owns and to drive them in vans he owns to jobs for wages that can be artificially lower than the market because federal taxpayers are subsidizing their healthcare and grocery budgets. As Springfield’s 5% unemployment rate is still historically low, it may not be economically accurate to say the immigrants are taking the locals’ jobs. But given Springfield’s dire housing shortage, compounded by state and local laws that inhibit organic housing growth, locals argue the migrants are taking their shelter.
In a sprawling line that bends around the block for the Second Harvest Food Bank, I met Lori, who maintains she was ousted from her old home in favor of a new class of renters with cash to spare, driven by Haitian demand and taxpayer subsidies.
“I was there for seven years, in that house by myself,” said Lori, who was forced to leave after her landlord raised the rent twice in two months. “I’m in a senior housing place now because he put me out, and the new owners did not want low income in their house because they knew the Haitians could have thousands of dollars in rent.”
The landlord sold the house for nearly triple what it sold for in 2005, orders of magnitude greater than the 61% increase in the national average home sale price in that time.
“I mean, he and the new owners literally picked me and my stuff up and practically put me out on the street so they could get more rent,” Lori said. “And here I am, a disabled senior citizen, lady that’s alone. They didn’t care. I practically begged to let me stay there, you know, and they wanted me out.”
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Despite the national media narrative, the Springfield residents themselves are still largely supportive of the Haitians. The day after the debate, a Wednesday, Steve McQueen of the neighboring Yellow Springs organized a solidarity dinner at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant for that Friday. Even though he had arranged the dinner to start at 6:06 p.m., a callback to a tradition for his historically black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, word got out, and a small dinner became an all-weekend affair. Rose Goute ran out of food by lunchtime on Friday, with hundreds still showing up for dinner. Police showed up in case anything got violent but shortly left after it was obvious they weren’t needed, and the restaurant again ran out of food on Saturday.
And while many of those hundreds were indeed Springfield residents who went out of their way to welcome local Haitians, McQueen has empathy for those neighbors more frustrated with the recent relocation.
“Springfield has been through, you know, the whole fentanyl painkiller crisis, and it got hit really hard by COVID,” McQueen said. “You add all that up and you end up with a lot of people who feel very let down by local, state, and federal government, and so they are lashing out.”
The government and its contracted charities all put out internal mandates of secrecy by the time the national news descended on the town. Although residents by the dozen will complain, unprompted, about everything from the spate of reckless driving to law enforcement’s refusal to do anything about it, neither the city government nor its agents will speak on the record.
When I speak to the Catholic Charities of Northwestern Ohio’s communications director about the federal funding it has received to provide legal and translation services to local Haitians, he hangs up on me in a fury when he realizes he never requested to go off the record. An employee at First Diversity escorts me to a private room where she says that while “I must know of all the news,” the company has not come out with a “response” at this time. A response to what scandal? According to Asra Nomani, the FBI and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost are now investigating First Diversity over human trafficking allegations.
The problem will only get worse before it gets better. From the Catholic Charities outpost to grocery stores, advertisements for helping Haitians buy TPS status are plastered across the city in Haitian Creole. Driving through one neighborhood housing mostly Haitians, I come across one on a post on a house patio and send it to a translator.
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“Even if you came on the Biden program or through the border, you can apply for TPS now,” the advertisement says. “Elections are near, and Biden is not in a position of strength, so take advantage of what you can, now.”
As I turned down the block, I encountered a dilapidated shack with boarded-up walls that belie the slew of cars in front of it. When I later looked up the property records, I found it is owned by none other than Ten Enterprises. At least one native Ohioan is getting rich from the Springfield migrant crisis.
Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.