It was claimed that the Haitian migrants are eating pets

JD Vance and the Bomb Threat: Why the Media Shouldn’t Care about Haitian Migrants and How to Stop Them

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said Sunday that he stood by the debunked claims he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets, saying that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

The claims that have been debunked by the city officials in Springfield, and which are similar to things that have been whispered against immigrants for decades, came from firsthand account from his constituency, Mr. Vance said. He called one of his interviewers a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his words and Mr. Trump’s to the bomb threats, and told another that she should “ignore” the threats and focus on Vice President Kamala Harris’s immigration policies instead.

The governor of Ohio, a Republican, was rebutting the claims in an interview on ABC News. Mr. DeWine said the claim that migrants were eating pets was “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.” And the governor said that while there had been some “challenges” involved in accommodating thousands of migrants, they were there legally and had benefited Springfield economically.

When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

Vance has argued that the media isn’t paying enough attention to unchecked immigration and the impact it’s having on smaller cities. The city of Springfield has received between 15,000 and 20,000 migrants in the last four years, many of them from Haiti.

The mayor of Ohio told WSYX that all federal politicians need to know that they are hurting the city by negatively spinning it.

“I want whoever made these threats to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he told Margaret Brennan of CBS. We don’t believe in a heckler’s veto in this country. He added: “I think that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town and focus on the fact that we have a vice president who’s not doing her job in protecting that small Ohio town.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance denied that their comments about the question had any connection to the threats that immediately followed them.

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was “the first-hand accounts of my constituents.” He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

Aurora police have said Trump’s claim that he would deport the Haitian migrants in Springfield and Aurora is hyperbole, after Trump told reporters at a news conference in California he would deport the migrants.

“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “We’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

In response to a recent influx of people from Haiti, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has promised to send additional law enforcement to the city as well as health care aid.

If you talk to people who work with the Haitians, they will tell you that they’re very hard workers. One person said to us, I wish I had 100 more people working for me. The people in Springfield are good people.”