“Get all Haitians out! Send them back to their sh**hole country. Why are they still here? Temporary means TEMPORARY. Start picking them up! Kick out every last one of them and other TPS trash!”
Online hatred and hostility, directed at Haitian immigrants in Ohio and around the country, is surging.
“There’s a lot of hate coming to Springfield,” said Denise Williams, longtime president of the city’s NAACP. “There’s a lot of like, get out, you don’t belong here. This is 2026 and we are here?”
The 72-year-old civil rights leader was shaken.
“These are our Haitian brothers and sisters, the most lovable, kindest people you can meet. But the haters, oh my gosh. This is a whole different feeling. And when you hear how the President talks about what he wants to do to Springfield, we are in danger.”
Lives are in the balance, said Williams, and “it’s like no one cares.”
Roughy 15,000 vetted Haitians living and working in the area, who followed every rule, every law, came to Ohio legally, paid for their flights, had sponsors, were lawful residents of Springfield until they woke up illegal last week.
On July 27 they lost their humanitarian safety net. The Trump administration ended their Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Congress specifically created the immigration relief program to provide safe haven and legal protections to foreign nationals who cannot safely return to their home countries — the indisputable reality for over 330,000 Haitian TPS holders in the United States.
Ground conditions in Haiti remain horrific. The country is on the verge of famine and in the throes of violent anarchy. Murderous gangs continue to kidnap and rape their way to territorial control.
Haitians in the U.S. are terrified of being deported back to hell. Callous indifference by Americas who can’t relate or the growing online/in-person venom — driven by political rhetoric from the highest levels of government — could seal their fate.
“I don’t think people realize how real life these stakes are,” said Springfield resident Tim Voltz. “How would you feel if you find out that the people who lived here amongst you were raped or killed upon their return to Haiti, or if they starved to death, or died of malnutrition or disease in a detainment camp, or they never saw their children again? Is that what you wanted? Is that the thing you were looking for?”
Voltz, an elder at Champion City Church in Springfield, is focused on the fallout of mass family separations that could affect around 1,400 U.S.-born children of Haitian parents in the city.
When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine quietly initiated contingency plans for that possibility, Voltz helped facilitate efforts to recruit local families willing to temporarily house children separated from their parents when ICE sweeps into the city.
Without a short-term solution to provide a stable home environment in the community he said, “those children become wards of the state and shipped to Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, wherever the state can find foster care. They would not only be removed from their parents “but from the only community they have known.”
The goal is to mitigate the trauma for distraught children if worse comes to worse.
“We don’t know how many people ICE will detain or deport or how many of those people will have children,” Voltz stressed. “All we can do is wait and hope we are working very hard on something that won’t be needed.”
It is the not knowing that has Springfield organizer Marjory Wentworth tied up in knots. She works with a coalition of local faith and community leaders that strives to support and protect Haitian families and individuals.
“It’s awful. Trying to make plans. Many have children born here. Is ICE coming? What does that mean? Some are getting ankle monitors put on them. Why suddenly criminalize a group of people who haven’t broken any laws? These are human beings with families who are a part of our everyday lives here, whether it’s your work situation, or your kids who play soccer in school together, or somebody you sit with in church. I mean those people are all gonna disappear at once? I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
This is not happening in some far away place to far away people. It is happening in Ohio, near Dayton. You could drive there.
The governor was born in Springfield — the city under siege since Donald Trump and JD Vance dehumanized its immigrant population for political gain.
They spewed lies about cat-and-dog-eating Haitians to terrorize the community.
Their cruelty invited members of the far-right Proud Boys and other white supremacy groups to march in Springfield’s streets while bomb threats closed schools and government buildings.
Every black and brown skinned person here has a target on their backs, said the NAACP’s Williams: “People who look like me, as well as the Haitians, are not safe. I’m telling people of color don’t be out after dark.”
Anti-black racism, Haitian American activist Guerline Jozef added, “has always been in this country” and it is “at the heart” of all these policies to revoke black immigrants’ TPS status and mass deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians to a deadly homeland.
“None of this surprises me,” said Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
“I know the system very well. I’ve experienced it. But to be honest with you, I did not think we, as a country, would be on this path of destruction by not prioritizing the lives of people who are paying taxes, who have businesses, children born in the U.S., who work in the health care industry, the hospitality industry, the farming industry, literally keeping us fed and cared for. They will be losing everything; they will be losing their actual lives.”
Jozef is adamant. Those lives must be saved. Somehow. From Springfield to Miami, she stressed, humanity must trump hate and cruelty.
One beleaguered city in Clark County, Ohio, bracing for ugly, could lead the way.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
