'Make Springfield great!' Haitians brace for what Trump will bring to Ohio town

This story was originally published by The 19th News.

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — Several minutes into President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on Monday, as he began talking about immigration, Yvena Jean François dug through a desk drawer for a notebook and pen.

“We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home … it fails to protect our magnificent law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world,” Trump said, repeating a frequent 2024 campaign claim for which he has not offered evidence.

Jean François jotted down a thought in the notebook on her lap, the words “FUN STUFF” printed on its colorful cover.

Trump carried on: “I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

Jean François wrote some more.

Once Trump finished speaking, Jean François went over the main takeaways she planned to share on an upcoming episode of the podcast she hosts out of her home studio in Springfield, Ohio, a city of roughly 60,000 residents that became a household name during the 2024 presidential campaign as misinformation and lies spread about its Haitian residents.

“The illegal people will be first to go in mass deportations,” she said.

The exact words Trump used were important to Jean François, who is also a member of Springfield’s Haitian community. She heard “dangerous criminals,” “entering illegally,” “prisons and mental institutions” and “criminal aliens” — and she started to relax. “The president said the first people they’re going to put out are the criminal people who already have deportation papers,” she noted. And that, she said, does not describe her or most other Haitians she knows in this southwestern Ohio city between Dayton and Columbus.

Like Jean François, Springfield’s Haitian migrants were drawn here by the potential for good-paying jobs in a place that had more jobs than workers who were able to do them. Many of these migrants have what’s called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which gives them the right to live and work in the United States legally and shields them from deportation for a set period of time. They arrived in Springfield as the country emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, from states like Florida and New York, which are home to the largest communities of Haitian Americans in the United States.

Established in 1990, TPS is a temporary status available to immigrants who come from countries facing exceptional circumstances, like environmental disasters, armed conflict and civil war. TPS was approved for Haitians in 2010 after a major earthquake decimated a large swath of the country. The Biden administration extended it last year until February 2026 amid an ongoing gang war that has cut off access to basic necessities like food and clean water for much of the island.

Haitians are also eligible to ask for humanitarian parole, another temporary legal status available to citizens from certain countries and approved on a case-by-case basis. Some apply for asylum, which, when granted, allows them to remain in the United States indefinitely, become permanent legal residents and, sometimes, citizens. Unlike asylum, neither TPS nor humanitarian parole offers a path to citizenship, so Haitians and other immigrants living in the country under these designations cannot vote.

The 2020 Census put the population of Springfield at 68 percent White, 18 percent Black and 5 percent Latinx, but by some estimates, Haitians now make up as much as a quarter of the city’s population. Many, like Jean François, have arrived since the census, lured by opportunity. While her twin brother moved to Chicago, she came to Springfield. A photographer and broadcast journalist in Haiti, she found work at an Amazon warehouse and saved up to open her in-home studio; she’ll soon move it to a new, professional space, she said.

Jean François sees herself as an important part of a revival in this post-industrial, quintessentially American city, where recent Haitian arrivals have opened at least 10 new businesses — restaurants, groceries and a food truck. The creators of “The Simpsons” set the show in a fictional “Springfield” because there are at least 34 states with a Springfield, each of them in some way representative of “Anywhere, USA.”

In Springfield, Ohio, the population dwindled for decades as auto and farm equipment manufacturers closed and jobs evaporated. Between 1999 and 2014, the city’s median income dropped 27 percent — more than any other metropolitan area in the country, according to analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In 2012, the polling firm Gallup reported that Springfield was the country’s unhappiest city.

Just over a decade ago, city officials and business leaders launched a campaign to recruit employers in the manufacturing, insurance and health care sectors, to inject new life into a sputtering economy. Soon, they started to see results. Between February 2020 and March 2024, Springfield reported the second-highest employment growth rate in Ohio, behind only the much larger Cincinnati, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The rapid influx of Haitians, though a boon for employers who needed workers, also brought its own set of problems. Rental homes became harder to find and more expensive, classrooms got crowded and wait times for a doctor or an appointment at the motor vehicles office became longer.

Then in July, with the 2024 elections underway, JD Vance, then a Republican senator for Ohio vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate, asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in a banking panel hearing, “What role do you see illegal immigration driving up housing costs?” Vance continued: “In my conversations with folks in Springfield it’s not just housing.” Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heck, both fellow Republicans, fanned the flames when they went on the television program Fox & Friends to discuss Biden administration immigration policies. “It’s setting communities like Springfield up to fail,” Heck said, asking for additional federal support. As he spoke, footage played of a chaotic scene from a place thousands of miles away: the U.S.-Mexico border.

Several days later, Trump picked Vance to join him on the GOP ticket, thrusting Springfield — and its Haitian community — squarely into the glare of an increasingly contentious presidential race and a national debate about who deserves to stay in the country.

Trump, whose punitive and restrictive immigration stances have fueled his political rise, spread misinformation from social media accounts that said Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield. In a high-profile presidential debate, he repeated the claims. Vance did, too, despite city officials saying there was no evidence to back them up. Trump promised to deport Haitian migrants with legal status. During a September news conference, he said, “They’ve destroyed the place.”

Neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups amplified the lies about pet-eating and descended on Springfield. There were bomb threats. Employers of Haitian workers were harassed. The woman who initially spread the rumor recanted, horrified by what she had wrought. Still, the Trump-Vance ticket kept leaning on the Springfield fable to bolster their immigration stances. “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,” Vance told CNN.

Republican local and state elected officials like Rue and Heck tried to quell the chaos. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, implored: “Everybody needs to lower the rhetoric.” Meanwhile, the community rallied behind Haitian businesses and local law enforcement talked about Haitians as more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime. A previously informal Haitian Community Alliance cemented its status as a legal nonprofit.

Trump went on to win Clark County, where Springfield is the county seat, with more than 64 percent of the vote.

In the two months since Trump’s victory, some Haitians have left Springfield, according to interviews with residents and community organizations there. They’ve returned to New York or Florida or moved to larger cities in Ohio like nearby Dayton or Columbus, where they might be less conspicuous — but where they lack the community they created in Springfield. Jean François knows some who tested the waters elsewhere only to return.

Jean François sees little reason to leave; the same Trump administration immigration policies would apply anywhere else in the country, she said, because, “Florida, New York — you’re still in America.” Her goal is to continue using her podcast to urge fellow Haitians to stay calm, stay in Springfield and “do the best things for this city.”

“I know Springfield, I love Springfield. Stay, stay here with me,” she told The 19th from her home studio. “Like the president said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ Make Springfield great.”

Hours later, Trump terminated the humanitarian parole program that Biden launched, one that allowed more than half a million migrants from four countries to remain legally in the United States for a two-year period. One of the countries was Haiti.