Marilou Johanek, Ohio Capital Journal

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....

JD Vance famously admitted he was willing “to create stories” to attract media attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.

It was his stunning defense of knowingly spreading false, racist rumors of pet-eating Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio.

The lie demonized the large, legally welcomed immigrant population in Springfield to stoke anti-immigrant hostility (against a powerless community) and fuel MAGA zealotry for mass deportations....

What a cop out. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he didn’t want to sign another voter suppression bill into law before he signed a sweeping anti-voting measure into law last Friday.

Spoken like a true invertebrate.

Despite an outpouring of opposition from voting rights advocates, DeWine codified Ohio Senate Bill 293, a measure rushed through the legislature with only one hearing in the Ohio House that will change nearly every aspect of voting by mail, voter registration, and provisional ballot processing. ...

Will we be next? Ohio’s Somali community, the second largest in the U.S. after Minnesota, is terrified that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Somali immigrants in Minneapolis will spread to Columbus, where an estimated 60,000 Somali Americans live.

A surge in ICE activity and racial profiling targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities followed Trump’s racist rant last week against the entire Somali community in America that among them includes an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens.

Sit with that for a minute....

Try as they did to mislead and deceive Ohio voters about the horror of protecting abortion access and other forms of reproductive care in the state constitution, Ohio Republicans — from the governor on down — failed to fool 57 percent of the electorate in 2023.

Voters from across the political spectrum saw through the preposterous propaganda meant to dissuade Ohioans from enshrining the right of every individual “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in the Ohio Constitution.

The decisive passage of Ohio’s Issue 1 amendment to preserve the right to make those decisions, including abortion, was essentially people telling politicians to butt out of personal medical choices they had no business meddling in....