Stephen Miller is very, very excited about the Supreme Court’s big ruling Thursday allowing Donald Trump to summarily end protections from deportation for hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the United States. After the decision came down, Miller enthused: “We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants.”
If we take Miller at his word, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is about to hit a Trump-backing county in red Ohio with a big, disruptive operation. Around 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants live in the area in and around Springfield, a small Rust Belt city in Clark County, which Trump won in 2024 by 30 points. Many enjoy Temporary Protected Status, which grants protections to people from dangerous, crisis-ridden countries—status that Trump has scrapped. Now that the high court has sided with Trump, many will be subject to immediate deportation.
The name “Springfield” might jog your memory a bit. During the 2024 campaign, Trump and JD Vance targeted Springfield when they pushed the vile smear that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets. The Trump-Vance demagoguery unleashed searing social tensions in this postindustrial Midwestern city, and it temporarily became the center of our political universe before other controversies intervened.
Now, however, Springfield has taken on an overlooked role in the Supreme Court’s new ruling. The case involves Trump’s 2025 decision to end TPS for around 330,000 Haitians nationally and a smaller number of Syrians. Plaintiffs sued, arguing in part that race drove the decision. Exhibit A was Trump’s language about Haitians in Springfield, such as his claim that they are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” of the city’s residents.
In a widely condemned move, the conservative justices, led by Samuel Alito, found a way to rule that none of those statements were “overtly racial” and that the decision to end TPS “could” be motivated by “race-neutral justifications.” Intriguingly, their ruling didn’t bother to print any of Trump’s supposedly non-overtly-racial statements. But in her searing dissent, Justice Elena Kagan marshaled tons of racist statements from Trump, noting that race was obviously a partial motivator behind nixing TPS—enough to demonstrate an equal-protection violation.
In a sense, this whole saga shows what happens when the deranged world of MAGA make-believe becomes the basis for real-world policy. At the time, the pet-eating smears about Haitians in Springfield were entirely made up. Indeed, JD Vance openly said the meme was designed to draw attention to the more important story: that Springfield had been “ravaged” by Haitian immigrants.
But the thing is, the underlying story that Vance piously claimed to care about was also made up. Vance buttressed his “ravaged” slur by falsely insisting that Haitians had brought a “massive rise in communicable diseases,” thus pushing the vile smear that immigrants are diseased.
Indeed, you might have forgotten what happened after Trump and Vance targeted Springfield: Many locals forcefully debunked the bigger story Vance purported to be telling. They vociferously defended those Haitians, and spoke up emotionally about their contributions to local economies and communities.
This even included Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue. DeWine hailed the Haitians as “hard workers” who just want “the chance for a better life,” having escaped “one of the poorest and most dangerous places on earth.” Local business owners powerfully seconded these sentiments.
So will ICE now descend on this small Ohio city and turn it into the next Minneapolis?
Miller seems to suggest as much. An alternate possibility is this: Rather than big, splashy raids, ICE could proceed with what Ohio-based immigration advocate Lynn Tramonte calls a strategy of “attrition.” This would entail taking quiet steps to make the Haitians’ lives more and more unlivable, perhaps with pressure on local employers to fire all their Haitian workers, who will now lose their work permits.
Such a move would avoid drawing too much attention to the removals, which would likely prove deeply unpopular, both in Springfield and even in the redder areas outlying it. After all, the Haitians are deeply interwoven into the area, both economically and in terms of community. Jim Swift of The Bulwark reports this from on the ground in Springfield:
Haitians have helped reverse decades of decline in Springfield since 2010. They filled factory jobs, opened businesses, started churches, and helped stabilize the city’s population after years of shrinkage.
As the Ohio Capital Journal details, local officials are now bracing for these removals, because their impact would be deeply disruptive. They would slash the local workforce while eliminating $300 million in annual spending throughout Clark County, possibly leading to an economic loss of $400 million.
Great job, MAGA! Way to own the pet-eating immigrants and their lib defenders!
Springfield looms large in the MAGA imagination. In Vance’s mythology, it’s a typical example of a small Rust Belt city that got hammered by deindustrialization, and then got hit again when elites callously allowed immigrants to savage the place. The real story, though, is much more complex. While the influx did produce some social tensions, local leaders have regularly described them as manageable and immigrant workers have helped drive the town’s growth and revitalization.
Thus it is that even in one of Vance’s storybook postindustrial towns, turning ICE loose would likely encounter serious opposition—yet another sign of how toxic Trump’s real immigration agenda becomes when people get a close look at it. Time will tell whether ICE will be unleashed or whether removals will be more subtle. But however that goes, local officials predict that Clark County, which has benefited from Haitian migration to the tune of 10,000 workers, will take a hit.
Here’s the thing: If you vote for the ticket that tells you immigrants are eating your pets—the ticket that tells you mass removals are needed to purify and revive the nation and its heartland towns—what you’re actually going to get is social turmoil, violent ethnic purges, and serious economic disruption. If you are upset at the prospect of law-abiding immigrants being violently wrenched from your communities, next time don’t vote for the guys who lied in your faces so viciously about them.
