'Beheaded a 12-year-old': Springfield rallies as scared Haitian neighbors hide

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — Roughly 500 gathered at Springfield City Hall Saturday to protest the administration of President Donald Trump. But even though Trump last year highlighted the city’s 15,000 residents from Haiti, many have been been scared into the shadows, protestors said.

“I really believe that most people don’t want what’s happening right now,” said Jessica Shafer, a mental health therapist who works with vulnerable children in Springfield. “I come to things like this because I think it’s incumbent on people who can to come to these things and stand up and show people it’s OK to make your voice heard.”

The rally in Springfield was one of more than 1,000 across the country that drew more than a million “No Kings” protestors against Trump on Saturday.

No Kings protests around the nation denounce Trump’s actions

Trump put Springfield’s Haitian community in the crosshairs last year when, during a presidential debate, he repeated the racist lie that the immigrants were stealing their neighbors’ pets and eating them. Then a senator from Ohio, now-Vice President J.D. Vance repeated the lie about his own constituents — even though his staff knew the allegations were untrue.

In the wake of the untruths, dozens of bomb threats were made to Springfield schools and other public buildings and its Haitian residents came in for even greater harassment.

“They’re terrified. Rightfully so,” Shafer said of her Haitian neighbors. “I can’t tell them anything. I wish I had answers, but I don’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t have any way to relieve their anxieties.”

Trump is now revoking temporary protected status for a half-million immigrants, including those from Haiti. That condemns thousands of Haitians in Springfield to return to a place where anarchy and gang violence reign, said Carl Ruby, a pastor who has many of the immigrants in his congregation.

“They go back and forth between somehow thinking it’s going to work out to being terrified,” he said. “What people need to understand about them is what they’ve already been through in Haiti. So this does not scare them as much as it scares us.”

He added, “But they are good people and they’re in danger. There are people at my church who are on lifesaving medications they can’t get in Haiti. They’ll die if they get deported. There is one person whose children are still in Haiti and the gangs beheaded a 12-year-old girl on the street that runs in front of their house. People don’t understand what they’re sending Haitians back to.”

Shafer said that the things that Trump and his allies in Congress want to do would be devastating to everybody in Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat — not just the Haitians.

About 770,000 Ohioans stand to lose health coverage under Medicaid if the U.S. House budget — Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — becomes law. Hundreds of thousands in the state are also likely to go hungry if cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in the legislation become reality.

“I know what’s going to happen if we cut Medicaid,” Shafer said. “Forty four percent of Clark County is on Medicaid. I work with youth. Seventy seven percent of Springfield’s school district rely on SNAP funds to provide free and reduced lunches. We have roughly 17,000 households that rely on SNAP benefits in our county. And they’re talking about cutting all of that.”

Sherry Schaaf, who lives in Clark County outside of Springfield, said she turned out because she thinks Trump is tearing at the foundations of democracy. For example, she said, Trump deployed the National Guard and the Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles even though the governor and the mayor didn’t want them.

“It’s treasonous,” Schaaf said. “It’s all for political theater.”

She said she felt a duty to stand publicly against such conduct.

“It is time for us to stand up against the administration and the illegal things that they are doing,” Schaaf said. “If we don’t stand up we’re going to end up like Germany did.”