Last week, Republicans launched a string of bizarre and racist claims about Haitian immigrants, including falsely suggesting that they eat people’s pets.
The baseless attacks came from both the party’s official social media accounts, lawmakers and Republican presidential candidates. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said Monday that “illegal Haitian immigrants” are “causing chaos,” while former President Donald Trump categorically and falsely asserted during Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that “they’re eating the pets of people who live there. This is what’s going on in our country.”
The comments echo commonly used tropes and past attempts to link Haitian immigrants to everything from the spread of disease to increased crime.
Republicans have emphasized those messages as they seek to capitalize on voter discontent with current trends and make immigration an issue in the November election. In Haiti, political unrest and gang violence have forced thousands to flee. The Biden administration has also approved temporary protected status and humanitarian parole for some newcomers.
But the stereotypes Republicans keep repeating have been around for a long time.
Indeed, experts told Vox that these ugly attacks are the byproduct of centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobia, and have repeatedly been used to justify restrictive immigration policies that specifically discriminate against Haitians. The decision to resurface these attacks in 2024 will only exacerbate this legacy by re-creating a demonstrably dangerous environment.
“This is part of a very old historical pattern,” sociologist Regine Jackson, dean of the humanities department at Morehouse College, told Vox. “The idea that they can do things that are very inhumane and un-American. The underlying message is that these people will never be like us.”
Anti-Haitian racism runs deep
Attacks against Haitian migrants exploit the United States’ long-standing view of Haiti as a threat.
“Racism and xenophobia against Haitians among white Americans is fuelled by the idea that Haitians… [overthrew] Slavery and [established] “The United States was the world’s first black republic,” Carl Lindskoog, author of a book about the U.S. detention of Haitian immigrants, told Vox. “Ever since then, Haitians have been viewed by many white Americans as a threat to white dominance and have been treated as such.”
In 1804, Haitians succeeded in overthrowing French colonial rule and slavery. The United States, fearful that their victory would inspire a similar revolution among American slaves, did not recognize Haiti’s independence for almost 60 years.
After the revolution, France used military force to demand reparations for the loss of its colonies, forcing Haiti into debt to cover the demands. The United States and France provided these loans and continued to control Haiti’s finances for years. According to a New York Times investigation, the reparations to France cost Haiti’s economy a combined $21 billion, directly contributing to the poverty and financial problems that plague the country to this day.
The United States also occupied Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934, more than a century after the success of the Haitian Revolution, on the flimsy pretext of ensuring political stability following the assassinations of several Haitian presidents, but in reality to prevent the expansion of French and German influence in a region that was considered strategically valuable. During this time, the United States instituted a forced labor system and sold Haitian land to American corporations.
The power seizure also sent a humiliating message that Haiti was incapable of handling its own problems.
“Many scholars have talked about the rhetoric used to justify invasion in the name of civilizing societies,” says Jamela Gau, a sociologist at Bowdoin College. “The idea that Haitians are backward, criminal and dangerous started a long time ago.” The link between Haiti and Voodoo practices was raised this week by Marianne Williamson, a self-help author who ran in the 2020 and 2024 Democratic presidential primaries, and it’s another tactic that has been used to suggest Haiti is a “mysterious immigrant other,” Gau says.
In the decades since, the United States’ treatment of Haitian immigrants has been reinforced by this belief, which became evident in the 1970s, when waves of Haitian immigrants sought asylum in the United States to escape political persecution at the hands of the U.S.-backed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many of these immigrants were detained and denied asylum, despite meeting the qualifications for the right to seek asylum.
These practices set a precedent for the detention of asylum seekers, a punitive approach that the United States still employs today. Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti In that case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. government had engaged in blatant racial discrimination by giving preferential treatment to Haitians in its immigration policies. Despite the ruling, then-President Jimmy Carter and his successors found loopholes to allow the practice to continue. In the years that followed, Cuban and Haitian immigration surged at the same time, but Haitians were far more likely to be detained than Cubans.
Prejudice against Haitian immigrants continued in subsequent decades, as did efforts to link Haitians with diseases like HIV. In the early 1980s, before HIV/AIDS had a scientific name, the press and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention referred to it as the 4H disease, an acronym for “Haitian, Homosexual, Hemophiliac, Heroin User,” in part because some of the disease’s earliest cases were Haitians.
Fear of HIV and viewing Haitian migrants as vectors of disease was one of the reasons that led the United States to detain Haitian asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay in the 1990s (thousands were detained and deported, and some HIV-positive people were threatened with indefinite detention). This is part of a long history of the U.S. government preventing the entry of migrants because they are viewed as health risks, a practice that has been employed again during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations have used a federal authority known as Title 42 to turn away migrants due to public health concerns during and after the pandemic, and Haitians have been one of the largest groups turned away at the southern border for those reasons, Lindsborg said.
Other attacks against Haitians have been evident under both administrations, such as when President Trump himself called Haiti a “shithole” country, or when, under Biden, Border Patrol agents were caught riding horses and holding the reins while confronting Haitian migrants.
These attacks have real consequences
In the town of Springfield, Ohio, the latest Republican accusations are already causing real-world harm.
On Tuesday, President Trump delivered his biggest conspiracy theory speech yet, and since then, his repeatedly denied claims about immigration have only spread.
In response, Haitian immigrants in Springfield – the town where Republicans say the pet-eating is taking place – have suffered property damage and have kept their children from school out of safety concerns, the Haitian Times reported.
Springfield City Hall was also evacuated Thursday after a bomb threat and two elementary schools were evacuated Friday over concerns about public safety. The mayor said he believes both incidents are linked to claims about Haitian immigrants.
Springfield, a city in the southwestern part of the state with a population of about 60,000, has become a target for Republicans due to changes since 2020. The city’s manufacturing boom has brought about about 15,000 Haitians to Springfield in search of work, and while the population increase has contributed to the revitalization of the town,, It has also put pressure on social services, with longer waiting times at medical clinics and increased competition for affordable housing, leading to growing hostility towards newcomers.
That outrage was intensified by the 2023 death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark in a school bus crash because the driver of the vehicle was a Haitian immigrant. Republicans and other figures on the right have since used Clark’s death to highlight the threat posed by immigrants, but Clark’s parents have pleaded with them to stop.
This hostility towards Haitian immigrants has led neo-Nazis and Republicans to spread lies that immigrants are not only eating pets but also ducks in local parks, a lie Springfield authorities said they have no evidence of.An incident involving a non-immigrant, non-Haitian woman eating a cat occurred a few miles away in Canton, Ohio.
The pet-eating trope is not new and has long been used to demonize immigrant communities in the United States, including Asian immigrants. Republicans have used these stereotypes to portray immigrants, including Haitians, as “forever foreigners” and try to deport them. The focus on pets in particular is designed to dehumanize immigrants and suggest they can damage the things people hold dear, Jackson said.
“This kind of language, this kind of misinformation, is dangerous, because no matter how ridiculous and stupid it is, there are people who are going to believe it, and they are going to act on it and take actions that will hurt somebody, and so this has to stop,” White House press secretary John Kirby said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Vance downplayed those concerns when asked about his comments by NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor after Tuesday’s presidential debate: “Which do you think is the bigger problem — that I insulted 20,000 people, or that my constituents are no longer able to live a good life because Kamala Harris has opened the border?” Vance said.
But as American history, and the threat faced in Springfield this week, make clear, these racist beliefs can directly influence policy and have immediate, dire consequences.
