Any day now a swarm of armed state police dressed for war could descend on a metropolitan area in south-west Ohio.
The small town of Springfield in Clark County is awaiting an invasion of unaccountable thugs who conceal their faces and identities, drive in unmarked vehicles with blackened windows, stomp on the Bill of Rights, and viciously brutalize human beings based on race and accent.
The clock is ticking for 20 to 25 percent of the city’s population from Haiti. In two weeks, barring last-minute legal or congressional intervention, immigrants from the violently imploding Caribbean country will lose their legal protection from rampaging ICE warriors eager to fill deportation quotas.
The militarized sweep of terror unleashed by unrestrained federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that has traumatized Minneapolis and the nation writ large could be coming to Springfield soon.
An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian residents in the metro area — many of whom have been living, working, and raising families in the area for close to a decade under a legal immigration lifeline — will be stripped of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) on Feb. 3.
That means on Feb. 4, a paramilitary ICE force of masked tough guys can grab and deport as many Creole-speaking Black people in Springfield as possible.
Those who protest the savagery deployed against their neighbors could face the same harassment and dispersement tactics demonstrators in the Twin Cities did with flash grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets or, like Renee Good, worse.
The Ohio city is bracing for barbaric.
Haitian residents cut off from their legally protected status could meet the same fate as other immigrants besieged by cosplaying federal Rambos with weapons and short fuses.
The Haitians who flocked to Springfield to escape a violent homeland trusted Ohio to have their backs. They worked their tails off and endured much to revive a dying Rust Belt region. But the lives they painstakingly built in Ohio as co-workers, business owners, community activists and church-going family people are nearing an expiration date.
The huddled masses who yearned to be free in Springfield are terrified of being returned to Haiti which is even more turbulent and deadly than when they left.
It is considered too dangerous by the U.S. for its own citizens.
The State Department gave Haiti its highest Level Four: Do Not Travel advisory due to extreme risks of being caught in gunfire or ongoing gang violence, kidnappings, armed robbery, sexual assault, and severe shortages of basic necessities including fuel, water, and food.
Yet while acknowledging (in a gross understatement) that “certain conditions in Haiti remain concerning,” the Trump regime insists the bloody hellscape is safe enough to ship 350,000 Haitian immigrants legally employed in the U.S, including Springfield, back home.
The Department of Homeland Security even dangled a $1,000 incentive to Haitians who self-deport.
One Springfield immigrant who is haunted by the bodies he saw regularly on the streets of Haiti, gunned down by roving gangs, flinched at an exit bonus to armed conflict.
“You could be self-deporting to your death,” he said.
The Haitians who turned to Ohio for security, employment, and hope rescued Springfield said local pastor Carl Ruby.
The town had been in decline for 70 years before the 2017 arrival of Haitians, he explained.
“We had shrunk all the way back to the population we had in 1910,” and the influx of immigrants, granted temporary refuge in Springfield, was “one of the best things that has happened in terms of economic growth and tax revenues” despite initial growing pains.
“There were legitimate issues when such a large group arrived all at once, but we’ve made a lot of progress in dealing with those issues and it’s going to be both an economic and humanitarian disaster if TPS ends.”
At the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, executive director Viles Dorsainvil said many of his compatriots who survived political upheaval, insecurity and abductions in Haiti believed they had come to Ohio to work hard, raise their families, go to school and contribute to their community.
Now they shudder with fear and uncertainty as their final hours of safety and stability ebb away.
“But we keep going because we are a resilient people,” sighed Dorsainvil.
Yet if the Trump regime revokes the Haitians’ temporary protected status a couple of weeks from now ICE agents could quickly invade Springfield, like other targeted cities, and drag documented immigrants from their children their homes, their dreams.
Anxious town leaders are appealing for calm.
Meanwhile, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine warned of a looming economic crisis in Springfield if area factories and business cannot find replacements for the thousands of terminated Haitian employees slated for indefensible deportation to what DeWine called “one of the most dangerous places in the world.”
These immigrants were a godsend to American employers who struggled with hard-to-fill jobs.
In a sane world, Republican leadership in Ohio would be fighting tooth and nail to protect the TPS holders from Haiti building a robust economic comeback in Clark County because it is clearly in the best interest of the state to do so.
Ohio’s U.S. senators would be racing to obtain a TPS extension or redesignation for Haiti to give Springfield’s immigrant community work permit protections against removal to an extraordinarily unsafe country.
But they acquiesce without a fight while the madness of a militarized sweep of terror comes to south-west Ohio.
And it will. Any day now.
- Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.
