The latest furor in the United States is over whether Haitian migrants are eating pets or not. This claim made by Donald Trump at the presidential debate on Tuesday — which more than 67 million people watched — was all it took for analysts to rush to check the facts, the media to flood Springfield authorities with calls about the accusation, social media users to create a horde of offensive AI images of Haitians running after Trump as he carries an armful of cats, gullible Republicans to ramp up protection for their pets and memes to joke that Haitians — and by extension all migrants — are people capable of anything. Amid all this noise, no one mentioned the fact that Haitians are one of the most displaced people in the world, and that since 2010, more than half a million have left their country.
In the presidential debate, Trump turned the tragic issue of immigration into a farce. He said that in Springfield, a small city that has welcomed almost 20,000 immigrants in the last four years, many of them Haitians, are eating pets. “They’re eating the dogs — the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said.
J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, made this same accusation to attack Kamala Harris and the Biden administration’s policy at the southern border. “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 posted on “The American media ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. Suppose I have to create stories so that the American media pays attention to the suffering of the American people. In that case, that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.
When asked if he had made up the story, Vance said it was based on “the firsthand account of my constituents.” “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he added. “I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies. Her policies did that.”
Following the statements, the Haitian government condemned the “discriminatory statements” of the Republican candidate and other members of his party, and insisted that “unfortunately, this is not the first time that compatriots abroad have fallen victim to disinformation campaigns, been stigmatized and dehumanized to serve electoral political interests.” The statement stressed that such comments “undermine the dignity of our compatriots and could endanger their lives.”
Organizations have long called on the United States to end their racist treatment of Haitian asylum seekers. A 2023 Amnesty International report said Haitian migrants are particularly affected by racism, xenophobia and systematic violence. Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said at the time that “racist migration and asylum policies only exacerbate the harm” inflicted on these people.
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