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The people of Springfield, Ohio, are exhausted. It’s been one hit after another lately.
Some of the trouble started back in 2024, when Donald Trump claimed during a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in this small blue-collar city were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.
It was a false, racist rumor, but it thrust the otherwise quiet town into the national spotlight. White supremacists showed up to march. Bomb threats rocked local schools. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who was born in Springfield, sent state troopers to protect residents.
Then Trump returned to the White House and began his deportation campaign. His administration has sought to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain immigrants. That’s a humanitarian designation that allows a person to stay in the United States because their home country is too dangerous for them to repatriate.
“You speak to the mayor, ministers, business owners, neighbors—they’ll tell you the Haitian community has revitalized a city that was dying.”
With TPS for Haitians on the brink, this little Midwestern city with a big Haitian population is back in the spotlight, coping with all the chaos and terror that attention from Trump and his administration can unleash. “It just feels like a lot of forces are coming to bear on this one small city,” says Marjory Wentworth, a writer who volunteers with efforts to help immigrants there. “We are trying to navigate,” adds Vilès Dorsainvil, a Haitian community leader, but it’s “very difficult.”
Springfield is, in some ways, an unlikely target. Florida, New York, and California are home to many more of the country’s 350,000 Haitian TPS holders. But the city stands out for its ratio of newcomers: By some estimates, roughly a fourth of its 60,000 or so residents are Haitian. Many settled in Ohio during the pandemic, especially after Haiti’s president was assassinated in 2021. Haitians first received TPS in 2010, after the island experienced a devastating earthquake. Their status has been renewed repeatedly because of political instability and gang violence in Haiti—the latest renewal was set to expire on February 3.
The newcomers were welcomed by DeWine and business leaders who were worried about Springfield’s long declining population and hoped immigrants could fill jobs there. “You speak to the mayor, ministers, business owners, individuals on the school board, neighbors—they’ll tell you the Haitian community has revitalized a city that was dying,” says Pastor Keny Felix, who leads the Southern Baptist Convention National Haitian Fellowship from Florida and has met with community leaders in Springfield.
“We went from being one of the fastest shrinking small cities in America to the fastest growing small city,” says Pastor Carl Ruby of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, who has built a reputation providing services to immigrants.
Vilès Dorsainvil, who runs a Haitian support organization, in worship with other members of the Springfield community at Central Christian Church in 2024.Jessie Wardarski/AP
Trump’s deportation blitz, however, threatened the city’s revival. Springfield’s Chamber of Commerce had been getting about 20 inquiries a year from businesses looking to relocate to the city, but after Trump’s debate-stage rant about cats and dogs, companies stopped reaching out. Many Haitians in Springfield were laid off last year after the administration tried, unsuccessfully, to end their TPS status early—in August 2025. A court blocked the move, but too late to save their jobs.
And the official expiration date of February 3 was just around the corner.
A church rally in support of Haitian residents “was filled to capacity—the fire marshal had to ask people to leave.”
By January, Springfield’s Haitians were lying low, afraid to leave home for groceries or to bring their kids to school. Some struggled to pay rent or cover their legal expenses without jobs. They watched the news as Immigration and Customs Enforcement violently occupied another Midwestern city, Minneapolis, and wondered whether they’d be next. Once their status expired, they’d be immediately deportable. Raids were expected.
A group of Haitians around the country had filed a lawsuit to block the administration from ending Haiti’s TPS, and the judge was expected to weigh in any day. On February 2, one day before the expiration date, more than 1,000 people crammed inside St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield to show support for the immigrants. “The place was filled to capacity—the fire marshal had to ask people to graciously leave,” says Felix, who was there. Later that day, a federal judge in Washington, DC, issued a ruling that temporarily blocked the administration from ending TPS while the lawsuit continued.
“It was a relief,” says Dorsainvil, who runs the Haitian Support Center, a community nonprofit helping immigrants through this uncertain period, including by delivering food to families who are afraid to leave home. “Even though I knew it was not a final victory, at least we had some time to breathe.”
It was “a huge celebration,” Marian Stewart, a retired minister who volunteers with the group Springfield Neighbors United, told me the next day from Yellow Springs, a nearby city where she lives. She cautiously hoped that some of her immigrant neighbors might emerge from home again.
The bomb threats began anew less than a week later.
On February 9, the Springfield City School District received the first of the threats by email. So did the county municipal court and public safety building, where suspicious duffel bags were found. Officials closed roads and public schools. “These are threats that also referenced Haitians,” Gov. DeWine told reporters. “The whole essence was…get rid of the Haitians.”
Haitian parents rushed to pick up their kids from class, some recalling the bomb threats that followed the presidential debate in 2024—the one where Trump proclaimed, absurdly, “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats”—or thinking of their old lives in Haiti, when they had to rush to extract their kids from school during spates of political violence and street demonstrations. Haitians who came to the United States, Dorsainvil says, “never expected to get into a situation like this” again.
Even the judge in the TPS case has been getting threats: “The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet.”
After the bomb threats, law enforcement promised to check the schools every morning before they opened, but many kids stayed home the next day, according to Wentworth.
There were more bomb threats on February 10, this time targeting Clark State College, Wittenberg University, and the Clark County Department of Job and Family Services. The county sheriff said an initial investigation suggested the messages came from overseas, as in 2024.
A day later, a synagogue and two local churches received threats, including the church where the Haitians’ supporters had rallied on February 2. “This week’s been miserable,” says Wentworth, who teaches at Wittenberg. Pastor Ruby, who personally received dozens of harassing phone calls, had breakfast with another pastor who said he’d gotten an unexpected package in the mail—it was a camera, but he had to treat it as though it might be a bomb. The phone calls to Ruby came after people on TikTok spread vicious rumors that he and other faith leaders assisting immigrants are actually helping ICE and trafficking immigrant children. “Everyone’s on edge,” Ruby says.
“There is a real trauma that these folks are going through,” Geoff Pipoly, an attorney representing the Haitians who are suing the government over TPS, told me.
US District Judge Ana Reyes, who is adjudicating that lawsuit, is also receiving threats. In a recent hearing, she read aloud from angry missives people have sent to her chambers: “I hope you die today…The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet.”
“To those who would threaten judges,” Reyes, an immigrant herself, added, “we will act without fear or favor…We will continue to do our jobs…We will not be intimidated.”
Springfield’s Haitians may have enough supporters to fill a church, and then some, but their arrival was not without its tensions. The influx of 10,000 to 15,000 new people strained city services. “Apartments suddenly had occupants again, but that caused stresses: ‘We need more desks in schools,’ or ‘I had to wait an extra turn at the light,’” says Stewart, the former minister. At City Commission meetings, some residents referred to their immigrant neighbors using racist language, according to New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan, who has reported extensively from Springfield.
In 2024, local frustrations over resources became a breeding ground for the nasty political rhetoric that emerged during Trump’s campaign; that September, Republican VP pick JD Vance, who represented Ohio in the Senate, tried to attack Kamala Harris by spreading baseless claims about Springfield that were first fueled by far-right activists and neo-Nazis. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he tweeted.
Springfield police immediately shot down the pet-eating claims, but Vance’s lies took off on social media, spread by Elon Musk to his nearly 200 million followers on X. “Cat Lives Matter!” wrote Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.).
If ICE comes to Springfield to deport all Haitians, “they’re going to have to push their way into the church and arrest pastors.”
They have detractors still, but Springfield’s Haitians also have many defenders, and local groups have sprung up to support them. The Haitian Support Center, led by Dorsainvil, is a key resource. So is G92, a faith-based coalition that has offered Know Your Rights workshops and trainings for how to deescalate interactions with federal immigration agents. There is not a big ICE presence in Springfield yet, but there was a surge of ICE officers this winter in Columbus, just an hour away.
More court action could happen this week. If Haitians lose TPS status, additional ICE agents would likely show up. What would that mean for families? Last year, the county health department reported about 1,200 kids under the age of 5 who were born in Springfield to Haitian parents—children who could be left without their guardians if deportations ensue. “That’s a whole lot of kids potentially without parents,” she says.
The St. Vincent de Paul charity is helping families take precautions, including by designating alternate caregivers and securing passports for their children. The nonprofit Nehemiah Foundation is trying to set up safe spaces where kids can stay if they are separated from their families.
Making matters worse, driver’s licenses held by Haitian TPS holders expired on February 3. Ohio’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles won’t renew them as long as TPS status is up in the air. “It’s like a million small cuts,” says Wentworth, who says she and other volunteers are driving Haitian kids to school or their parents to doctor appointments.
The recent court decision is but a temporary reprieve; the administration could appeal up to the Supreme Court, which in October allowed it to terminate TPS for Venezuelan immigrants. “Haitians are in limbo,” Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance noted during an organizing call led by the advocacy group Red Wine and Blue. “How do you plan your life? Figure out where your kids will go to school? Sign a lease?”
And when is it safe to emerge from your home? As long as Judge Reyes’ order keeps TPS from expiring, the odds of a large-scale ICE operation in Springfield are reduced. “But if a higher court overturns that court order in two weeks, [ICE] can start raids in two weeks and a day,” says attorney Pipoly.
Haitians in Springfield have likened deportation to a death sentence—a return to gang violence, food shortages, and political instability. Even Trump’s State Department continues to warn against travel to Haiti. The dangers are so acute that I had trouble finding Haitian immigrants willing to speak to me for this article. “They will answer phones for people they know, maybe,” says Stewart, “but they are in serious fear, because they know if they get caught and have to go back to Haiti, more than likely they will get killed.”
Some local religious leaders are ready to offer them sanctuary if raids begin. “If they want to get them, they’re going to have to push their way into the church and arrest pastors,” says Ruby.
“The stress is unbelievable” for the Haitian immigrants—”feeling like you’re being attacked on all sides,” Wentworth adds. “You don’t know: What are you going to wake up to tomorrow? When are they going to pounce? It’s just exhausting.”
