Throughout the years, boosters of Springfield, Ohio, have chosen nicknames that suggest a welcoming, prosperous city. “Champion City” pays tribute to the nineteenth-century farm-implements company that made the Champion reaper and later became part of International Harvester, helping to seed an economic boom that lasted into the 1920s. “City of Roses” comes from the same era, when Springfield grew more roses than any other city. “Home City” alludes to the charitable homes for orphans and the elderly built by the turn of the twentieth century—casting Springfield as a kind of refuge.
But Home City became a cruel misnomer during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Springfield was targeted by Republicans and white nationalists who incited public hostility toward its growing community of Haitian immigrants. Having escaped violence and persecution in Haiti, many of the newcomers mistook Springfield for a safe haven. The inauguration of Donald Trump, who seems to harbor special animus toward Haitians, ended that. By April, when I visited the city, thousands of Haitian residents were lying low or in hiding or had fled, fearing the prospect of a state-sponsored purge. Mass deportations would come, they and others in town believed; the only question was when. Uncertainty became a terror unto itself.
I’d been following the city’s saga for a year before last September’s second televised presidential debate, when a heinous lie dripped from Trump’s lips and, by some awful alchemy, turned the city into a magnet for hate and moronity from all over the country. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” The lie became a meme, a TikTok craze, a canard celebrated by replacement-theory paranoiacs. On the ground in Springfield that month, the struggle was existential. Haitians kept their children home from school; some were attacked, some fled. A rash of bomb threats forced evacuations and closures of buildings all over town. Citizens who had publicly supported immigrants were singled out for hostile treatment. They faced death threats, harassment online and off, defamation, slander, doxing, and a type of swatting involving a gay dating app.
As president, Trump has continued to lie about Haitians in Springfield—almost every word he’s uttered about them is the opposite of the truth. He’s inflated their numbers, misrepresented their legal status (most are documented), and accused them of having “destroyed” a previously “idyllic” city. Local officials have tried to fight disinformation with facts, but that hasn’t worked. What national Republicans unleashed here was less like an infection than an autoimmune disease, the body politic attacking itself for reasons no one really understands. Facts seemed to make the inflammation hotter, more painful. “The greatest hardship we have faced in the past six months is the mischaracterization of our city,” Republican Mayor Rob Rue said in a statement after Trump again cited Springfield as an example of “migrant occupation” in an address before a joint session of Congress in March.
On one matter only, Springfielders could believe what Trump said, whether they saw it as a promise or a threat: that he was targeting their city for a mass deportation of its Haitian residents. Some fixated on August 3, when, barring a stay of Trump’s executive orders ending their Temporary Protected Status (TPS), many of Springfield’s Haitians would be subject to removal. Many had already received intimidating and false communiqués from the federal government ordering them to self-deport. Some residents told me they believed that Trump had plans for a mass deportation there this summer. A June 12 post by Trump, name-checking Springfield and claiming a “Historic Mandate” for mass deportations, triggered another wave of terror. “The fact that the president cannot keep our city out of his mouth means that I know he’s not forgotten us, and so I’m concerned what the outcome will be,” Rue said afterward. “We want to live in peace and freedom, and we do the best we can.”
I was nervous to visit. Springfield’s residents had been exploited, terrorized, and shamed, and many now faced the prospect of state-sponsored violence. And here I was, another journalist on the scene to examine their wounds, not to salve or soothe but to tell outsiders yet another story about them. I anticipated wary stares, pursed lips, and possibly even racism directed at me, a brown person on her own. Perhaps some of Trump’s lies had seeped into my consciousness, despite my defenses, because I imagined Springfield as a downtrodden place, an ugly, dangerous landscape full of loss and hate.
Backward Together
That’s not what I found. I drove into Springfield gawping through the windshield. The houses were gorgeous. There were imposing porticoes and fanciful turrets, mansards whose shingles looked like fish scales, and countless architectural fancies I lacked the vocabulary to name. Some houses resembled bigger versions of San Francisco’s storied Victorians—tall, wooden, whimsical. On High Street, there was a low-slung, red-roofed abode designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906. It lay in disrepair for decades until 2001, when a local foundation began its painstaking rehabilitation.
They’ve come, in the phrase chache lavi, to look for their lives.
A few blocks down, a hulking stone pile loomed over a wide, sloping setback. A revival Romanesque built in the 1880s for Asa S. Bushnell, a farm-equipment magnate who became Ohio’s governor, the house served for a time as the de facto governor’s mansion. But no one has lived there in ages. Today, like several other storied properties, the Bushnell mansion is a funeral home.
Venturing farther, you can see the decline the city has been through. Springfield’s south side is filled with otherwise magisterial houses that are now dilapidated: dandelion lots, peeled paint, soot stains, broken or boarded-up windows. The ramshackle houses give the wide, optimistic avenues a ghostly air, as if their edifices were specters of Springfield’s millionaires past, haunting and taunting the living as they drive to their second shift, school pickup, or one of the city’s dozen dollar stores.
I’d read about the city’s housing crisis. Rents surged after Haitian newcomers agreed—credulously, vulnerably—to pay far more than the going rate. The angry longtime residents who attend meetings at city hall every other week sometimes acknowledged that the high rents were not the fault of the newcomers, that both the white working class and precarious black migrants had gotten screwed by greedy landlords. But a lot of those who spoke out still didn’t want the Haitians around.
Throughout the week, I learned of heroic efforts at downtown revitalization: old factories and historic markets have been turned into breweries, restaurants, a snazzy coworking space. I toured the Wright house. Every day, I drove past a certain High Street mansion, cheerful yellow with tall shutters, that is an object of local controversy. It’s now an employment agency. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., its parking lot fills with cars, and Haitians pass in and out. Here are people trying to move “forward together,” as Springfield’s omnipresent city motto has it. They’ve come, per the phrase chache lavi, to look for their lives.
Unceasing the Crisis
Though there has never been a reliable count, officials estimated last year that between twelve and fifteen thousand Haitians were living in Clark County, which includes Springfield, adding about 17 to 20 percent to its population since the last census in 2020. The city was not prepared. There weren’t enough interpreters at schools or at the public-health clinic. Longtime tenants faced a dramatic affordability crisis; with Ohio prohibiting rent control, there were few available measures to address the skyrocketing rents. Roads grew crowded with erratic drivers.
On the morning of August 22, 2023, a Haitian drove over a median and struck an oncoming school bus. The bus swerved, flipped, and tumbled down an embankment. An eleven-year-old boy was pronounced dead at the scene; twenty-six others were injured, one of them seriously. It was the first day of school.
Aiden Clark’s death opened the floodgates of grievance. During the public-comments portion of the next week’s city commission meeting, residents barraged officials with anger, fear, and frustration in three-minute increments.
“Did we become a sanctuary city?”
“Who’s bringing ’em in?”
“Are they getting money from the city?”
“Who allowed the Haitian flag to be flown at our public building back in May? I didn’t know that we honored other countries’ flags on their flag day, especially when they fled a country that was so scary they couldn’t stay.”
“How do we know we’re not getting criminals, rapists?”
“When you say that there’s nothing we can do at the city level—how do you take a bunch of immigrants, put ’em on Martha’s Vineyard, and the next day they disappear?”
“How many more children have to die or be hurt?”
“Illegals!” a man shouted from the audience a couple of times.
The greatest tragedy of Springfield may also be the oldest—a failure of sight and solidarity that has let politicians get away with anything they want.
By October 2023, the deceased boy’s parents were begging fellow citizens not to use their son’s name in connection “with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings.” Forced to pivot, outrage found new forms. At commission meetings, residents accused their leaders of profiting from the immigrants; implied that resident Haitians, who had fled a land laid low by gangs, were themselves criminals; and invoked internet research to claim the newcomers had IQs lower than animals. The claims were as wildly absurd as Clark’s death was grave—travesties of sublimation, perhaps. They created a cesspool of paranoia and hysteria from which the monstrous dogs-and-cats lie rose.
I wanted to ask the commission why it tolerated all this invective. “We are not taking interviews on this matter at this time,” a city spokesperson wrote to me. Maybe officials reasoned that even deranged comments offered a chance to correct the record, that the appearance of censorship would fuel conspiratorial thinking. Or that the meetings were a release valve on a pressure cooker. The city’s guidelines against “rude, vulgar, offensive or disparaging comments” haven’t stopped scantily coded rhetoric about “an invasion,” “heritage citizens,” and “replacement.” A private Facebook group, Stop the Influx into Springfield, Ohio, is where some go to say the quiet parts out loud. The commission’s only black member, Krystal Brown, announced in February that she’d not be seeking reelection in part because of the “vileness” some citizens expressed.
Public comment at the commission meetings is technically open to anyone who lives in Clark County. But very few Haitian residents have spoken at them. And only a minority of residents has taken to the dais to urge kindness and humaneness. One consistent voice of welcome belongs to Pastor Carl Ruby, who believes that welcoming and protecting immigrants and other vulnerable people is central to Christianity. “Carl Ruby is a piece-of-shit coyote who should be run out of town,” an anti-immigrant resident posted on Facebook, according to Ruby. He was able to get that comment taken down, but the nastiness soon resumed.
Over the course of my reporting in Springfield, I learned that the lopsided views in the public comments aren’t proof of majority hostility among residents, many of whom have shown courage and generosity in other ways. But there was a painfully won understanding among those who support immigrants that their three-minute speeches were likelier to put a target on their own backs than to change minds or soften hearts.
One of Ruby’s primary worries is for the safety of his congregation, given other episodes of violence at houses of worship. Ohio doesn’t require permits for gun ownership, open carry, or concealed carry. A sign on the door of Ruby’s church prohibits firearms inside.
A Piece of the Continent
Emigration and exile have been part of Haiti’s cultural fabric for decades, at least since the start of François Duvalier’s dictatorship in 1957, when people fled in search of safety and a better shot at a decent life. During periods of hope—as after the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, the first democratic elections in 1990, and reconstruction efforts after the 2010 earthquake—Haitians have returned to their fallen paradise to try to rebuild. But its people are increasingly diasporic. Over the past fifteen years, the money migrants send home, a good indicator of emigration, has accounted for a rising portion of Haiti’s GDP.
Most Haitians in Springfield arrived after the worst of the pandemic, in 2021. They did not, in general, come directly from Haiti but had spent years beforehand on the move—from Florida to Indiana to Ohio, say, or from the Dominican Republic to Brazil to Chile to Mexico. Haiti had been falling into an abyss of violence and anarchy for several years, a fragile state tipped over the edge by a U.S. government that propped up compliant, corrupt leaders despite robust opposition.
In retrospect, 2021 was pivotal in the saga of the United States’ and Haiti’s mutual entanglement. Stimulus spending intended to keep the U.S. economy afloat during the pandemic was winding down, and Americans were losing federal unemployment benefits and other relief. That July, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, whom the United States had steadfastly supported despite his corruption, autocracy, and violent repression of dissent, was assassinated in his bedroom. That September, in Del Rio, Texas, Border Patrol agents drove out more than ten thousand asylum seekers, most of them Haitian, who had been sheltering beneath an overpass, in foul conditions, as they waited to make their claims at the border. A photograph showed a mounted Border Patrol officer who appeared to be lashing a Haitian man with a whip. The man, later identified as Mirard Joseph, was carrying plastic bags, knotted at the handles, filled with Styrofoam containers of food for his family.
The episode outraged Americans. The right seized on it as evidence of border chaos and insecurity. Others saw resonances of our country’s long history of antiblack and anti-immigrant violence. Then-President Joe Biden called the photographs “horrible,” as though his own administration’s policies hadn’t helped create the conditions at Del Rio in the first place. Chief among them was its extension of Title 42, a public-health order that the first Trump regime used to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border. Sealing off the border, or trying to, was what led to the debacle at Del Rio. Masterfully, the xenophobic, anti-immigrant right twisted the situation in Del Rio to accuse Biden of championing “open borders.”
The Del Rio debacle was significant to Springfield, not because the poor souls stuck under that bridge ended up there (many were deported to Haiti or “voluntarily” returned to Mexico) but because it was a PR disaster for Biden. He needed to end the spectacle of black migrants congregating at the border. In quick order, his administration ended Title 42 and launched a “humanitarian parole” program for Haitians. This enabled more than two hundred thousand Haitians to legally reside and work in the United States, usually for periods of two years. Those who entered the United States before June 2024 were also eligible to apply for TPS, which had been renewed for Haitians, mostly in eighteen-month increments, since 2010. (The first Trump administration’s attempt to end TPS for Haitians, in 2019, was snarled in litigation and, eventually, mooted by Biden’s election.)
Parole and TPS have amounted to shoddy jury-rigging, workarounds for a busted immigration system. Parole, which makes its recipients sound like criminals, provides entry through the back door. TPS can be renewed for a lifetime, so long as the president has enough humanity to refrain from stoking his base’s worse instincts. Both allow beneficiaries to apply for work permits, but neither provides a path to citizenship or, as we see in Springfield, durable protection. Instead, they allow Haitians to exist in the United States as laborers. When their labor is no longer needed or wanted, the laws provide for their removal.
The greatest tragedy of Springfield may also be the oldest: a failure of sight and solidarity that has let politicians get away with anything they want. Nativist Springfielders decrying an immigrant “invasion” may not notice the state is cutting back on funding to municipalities and opioid treatment in order to fund tax breaks for the rich. They may not dwell on federal cutbacks to food pantry programs like Second Harvest. “It’s disheartening how effective some of the politicians have been in creating these wedges around race, place of origin, you name it,” said Hannah Halbert, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio. “There’s so much common suffering and struggling in a lot of these communities across those lines of difference.” The anti-immigrant right cannot see that they and Haitians are in the same boat.
Vows of Parity
Casey Rollins taught in Springfield’s schools for thirty-four years, and though she’s been retired for almost a decade, it’s still easy to imagine Mrs. Rollins as the cool teacher. She has lively eyes, a rebellious streak, and pinkish cheeks that redden when she gets verklempt. “Reflecting is the hardest part,” she said. “Handling it is easier, because you’re tough, and you got to get in there and do it. But when you want to reflect on it, it gets pretty emotional. I always lose my voice.” It was symbolic of something, she figured.
Rollins is the longtime director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society—an unpaid volunteer, she clarified, hinting at some of the mud slung at her. The charity has helped countless Haitians in Springfield get on their feet with work permit applications, job connections, civic education, and emergency supplies, and both the organization and Rollins have lately been on the receiving end of threats. Menacing is the word she prefers, because “threat feels too concrete.” Rollins was waiting by the window bank when I drove into the parking lot of the building. In an attempt at discretion, she rushed me into her office.
St. Vincent de Paul used to have an open-door policy, she said when we were alone. Now it has locks on the doors and a doorman who checks IDs. The staff explains to immigrants, “We’re not afraid of you. We are protecting you from outsiders.”
We sat in her windowless office. A thick black binder sat on her desk; it was a kind of scrapbook of the past couple of years. Rollins hesitated to show me the contents. “I don’t want to endanger St. Vincent de Paul any further than what’s already happened.”
Most of the information inside is public. Rollins is one of eight plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe filed in February. Other plaintiffs include the City of Springfield, Mayor Rue, several commissioners, and a local litigator. The complaint alleges that in the fall of 2024, the Blood Tribe menaced or incited menacing calls over the phone and attacked Rollins on social media as a “crass, self-centered race traitor.” The neo-Nazis doxed her and urged followers to send her hateful messages; in the words of the lawsuit, “Rollins was subjected to numerous threatening telephone calls. . . . She has received messages calling her a ‘N—– lover’ and asking if she was ‘part of the importation of N—– invaders.’” Rollins was swatted. A hacker broke into her email account and used it to send a bomb threat.
When Haitians began arriving in Springfield, Rollins recalled feeling that it was a blessing “the way this whole community has stepped up and come together in love of service and love of humanity. It is just second to none. It is just—so wonderful.” Rollins has never seen her work as political but as a calling to serve the vulnerable. She is still flummoxed by the “angry mob reaction” St. Vincent de Paul provoked. She theorizes that “there is a faction of our community that is very angry that we are helping the wrong people and we are stripping them of their resources, and that we are focusing in the wrong direction, and we are not helping them when we could be.”
Rollins mused on the nature of action and reaction, progress and backlash, blessings and curses. The Supreme Court was soon to hear oral arguments in a case that would end birthright citizenship, and she’d be watching and worrying on behalf of more than a thousand babies born to Haitian mothers in the area.
At one point Rollins broke into sobs. Her head was in her hands, and I patted her back. “What these people have endured,” she said. She looked up. “I just want to hide them all. Then everybody keeps saying, ‘Stop saying that.’”
Neighborhood Devitalization
At the city commission meeting on September 24, 2024, a self-proclaimed childless cat-lady millennial named Amanda Richardson stood up at the podium and began on a note that her anti-immigrant neighbors may have mistaken for fellow feeling. “I was born in Springfield, and I’ve lived here most of my life, and I just want to say that I’m so angry about the changes in Springfield,” she said in the pious, how-dare-they tones of NIMBY indignation. Richardson then described Haitian contributions to the city: raising average wages, paying taxes to fund police and fire departments, restoring condemned houses and improving property values. “How awful,” she said. “I can’t believe they’re helping to fund our government and beautify our neighborhoods.”
From the perspective of some Haitians, their efforts to resuscitate Springfield are being repaid with hate.
Richardson is six feet tall with pale blonde hair. Always the tallest kid in school, she said she took to standing up for underdogs against bullies. She is extremely online, occasionally totes a giant cross-stitch supply bag with her, and describes herself as a denizen of the “ninth circle of nerd hell.” Over potato wedges and crab cakes at the Courtyard Marriott restaurant, Richardson told me how she became fed up with the tone of Springfield’s public comments against immigrants. She described a woman at a meeting decrying signs in Kreyòl. “I just went, This is the dumbest thing. You guys want to call liberals snowflakes who need their safe space, and she sounds like she’s about to be in tears over these signs in other languages.”
Richardson was speaking for “anybody in our community who saw the farce for what it was.” She didn’t expect a wider audience, but her speech went viral. Threats followed. Richardson was doxed, with harassers publishing her home address, phone numbers, and other contact information online. Ohio Homeland Security informed her that someone had posted a video on Gab, a neo-Nazi social network, threatening to pay her a visit. Richardson installed security cameras at her residence, scrubbed her online presence as best she could, and alerted local law enforcement that her address might be the subject of swatting calls. She’s spoken at the commission three times since. “Someone needs to push back against this crap,” she said.
Even for those who want them out, Haitians’ contributions to city and county coffers are undeniable. Throughout the pandemic and well into its aftermath, Haitians worked at Amazon warehouses, stamped doors and cut windows for manufacturers of car parts, and processed fruits and vegetables at Dole. Local employers have consistently praised the performance of their Haitian workers.
Their labor had ripple effects. Businesses relocated to the area or expanded their operations. Job growth was robust—the second highest among Ohio’s small cities from 2020 to 2024. The taxes Haitians paid on their wages shored up the city’s general fund. Their sales taxes helped fund county infrastructure. And their dollars came at a time of accelerating state cutbacks. For years, Ohio has been slashing municipal support in order to deliver tax cuts to the rich, “balanc[ing] its budget on the back of local government,” a Springfield commissioner noted at a finance meeting last year.
Before September, when both Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, promoted the pet-eating propaganda, “Springfield and Clark County were the strongest that they’ve been in my lifetime,” said County Commissioner Melanie Flax-Wilt, who is forty-eight. The city had begun to reverse decades of brain drain, in which young people left for college or other opportunities, never to look back. “It seems like we’re retaining those folks now.”
Many longtime residents believe that Haitians brought the city back to life. As Richardson attested in her sardonic remarks, the immigrants bought and fixed up neglected old houses and started businesses. Portions of the economy grew around them, from ESOL partnerships with the community college to grocery stores that found ways to import a Haitian bounty: Rebo coffee, Barbancourt rum, plantain chips, cassava bread, a dried mushroom called djon djon, a leafy green called lalo, and no fewer than five types of malanga, a potato-like tuber.
“They hold up our economy here, in my personal opinion,” real estate agent Amanda Mullins told me in May. She has lived in Springfield for ten years and has been selling houses for four. Half of her clientele is Haitian, people who work several jobs at a time and scrimped and saved for down payments. They were eager to put down roots and escape the predations of the rental market. Mullins estimates she’s sold twenty-five to thirty houses to Haitians. “When I first got to Springfield, boy, it was just run-down. A lot of drugs and things like that.” When she looks at it now, Mullins said, she marvels at how nicely the Haitians have fixed up these houses.
Mullins hired a Haitian partner, a former accountant who promptly got his real estate license. Together they created systems for translating complicated legal documents, guided clients and lenders through mortgage approvals, and educated clients on the intractability of deadlines. “And then September happens—cats and dogs. Immediately business stops.” Prospective homebuyers turned chary, Mullins said, as they waited to see who would win the election, and then how Trump would behave after his inauguration. Mullins’s business experienced an uptick in March, when the administration announced plans to eliminate Federal Housing Administration loans for immigrants without green cards.
Mullins loves Springfield, but she is not hopeful about its future. “You know, our city was just now starting to be revitalized. It’s so much different than what it was—a city coming alive,” she said. “When that goes away, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel it’s going back to the drugs, and the houses decaying.”
Many Haitians have already left, Mullins told me, as did employers and community workers. In April, the Springfield News-Sun reported that thousands of Kreyòl-speaking county residents had dropped off the rolls of federally funded Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare programs since July 2024. There are several possibilities: Haitians are leaving Clark County, they are no longer in need, they are no longer eligible for benefits, or they need the services but are lying low. Some have left out of indignation. From the perspective of some Haitians, their efforts to resuscitate Springfield are being repaid with hate.
I visited Lindsay Aimé at the Haitian Support Center, which he cofounded. The building is small and unmarked, apart from a small sign for the evangelical church with which it shares space, and Aimé was the only person inside. There was less activity than usual at the center, he said, because its staff was preparing for a benefit later that week. It was intended to raise funds and to share Haitian culture with Springfielders. A Haitian historian would give a lecture, Aimé said, and there would be delicious food from one of the two Haitian restaurants in town. To finish, the Haitian pop stars Michaël Brun and J. Perry would play.
Aimé wore a silver cross over a dark sweater and sat at a long folding table with his laptop. On the wall behind him was a mosaic of signs in Kreyòl and English, drawn by community members, he said. nou kanpe avek w nan difikulte yo (We stand with you amid the difficulties), we are happy you are here, love. On my side of the desk there were pamphlets and laminated cards with Kreyòl-language instructions on handling ICE encounters. pa louvri pòt la si yon ajan imigrasyon frape pòt la, said the first instruction: Don’t open the door if an immigration agent knocks.
Aimé grew up and was educated as a lawyer in Saint-Marc, about sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince. He started practicing in 2015. His nonimmigrant visa allowed him to visit the United States for business and tourism, which he said made him a target for kidnapping by gangs seeking large ransoms. He was in the United States in October 2019, planning to stay for a week, when his family warned him not to come home; the situation had gotten too dangerous.
After a stint in Indiana, Aimé settled in Springfield. Back then it was like “a ghost city,” he said, but there were jobs for those who wanted them. He hasn’t visited Haiti since. Plenty of Haitians have left Springfield over the past year, Aimé told me. They’ve gone back to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, “wherever they were before.” Or they’ve headed north, to Canada. Aimé pointed to the windows behind him, at the compact SUV in the parking lot. “I bought my car from someone who had to leave,” he said. It’s much better in Canada, the seller told him. “He couldn’t afford all the stress. People kept treating him as a criminal.”
Many of the Haitians who settled in Springfield had good lives in Haiti before violence forced them to leave, Aimé said. They’d come to Springfield, worked hard and well at jobs locals wouldn’t take, and helped revitalize the local economy. “They’re not gonna let people treat them anyhow.”
Aimé said he hoped to stay in Springfield, but he felt a disappointment with federal policy in the United States. It was supposed to set an example for the rest of the world—“the mother of justice, the mother of democracy”—but now its leaders were behaving as though it were a tin-pot dictatorship. He likened the United States’ treatment of Haitian immigrants to the Dominican Republic’s, where infants born to Haitian mothers have long been denied birth certificates. Now the Dominican Republic is deporting Haitians from hospitals, cracking down especially on maternal wards.
The Light Fantastic
“We are Haitians—and we are here to stay on our planet Earth!” the historian called out from the stage. The audience whooped and cheered.
It was Saturday night, my last in Springfield, and some 250 people had assembled at the John Legend Theater for the Haitian Support Center benefit. The turnout was better than Aimé anticipated, and most of the audience had arrived on time, though the event took a while to get going. I was looking forward to hearing from Aimé’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Viles Dorsainvil, who has been a prominent Haitian leader in Springfield these past few years. He was also a named plaintiff in a suit against the Trump administration for its orders attempting to shorten TPS for Haitians. On my right sat Amanda Mullins, the real estate agent. She and her Haitian partner had developed educational materials for their clients on powers of attorney and trusts, in the event they were deported. Pastor Ruby was on my left. He showed me a photo he’d just received, a selfie of five or six people grinning in the sunlight: congregants at Champion City Church had accompanied one of their Haitian members to a check-in with Citizenship and Immigration Services, fearing the worst, but the man was given another year.
Some in the audience must have known that Dorsainvil was at risk of losing his immigration status in August.
The historian, Bayyinah Bello, looked like a forest queen in a green robe and turban. Her hour-long talk focused on Haiti’s founding as a land of freedom for all, not just the kidnapped Africans who threw off their enslavers. Afterward, a gifted saxophonist played a solo. A group of Haitian students at the local high school performed traditional dances, their limbs graceful, their hair in Afros, their timing mostly in sync. The emcee stalled charmingly; it seemed clear the musicians J. Perry and Michaël Brun weren’t ready to go onstage yet. The audience laughed when the saxophonist was called upon to play yet another tune. Dorsainvil came to the podium, wearing a black linen shirt painted in tropical colors, and the audience settled into an expectant hush.
When the music finally started, the auditorium exploded with palpable joy: people young and old, Haitian and not, bopping, pogoing, and booty-shaking to a three-song set. After the buffet was served and festivities ended, Ruby would go home and prepare to deliver the next morning’s sermon, the second of a two-part talk on civil disobedience. All across Springfield on Sunday, pastors would consult with their congregants about sanctuary efforts to protect and defend Haitians from deportation. Casey Rollins would attend a five-kilometer fundraiser race arranged by the local honor society, proceeds to benefit St. Vincent de Paul.
In the weeks to come, the Supreme Court would issue an unsigned order allowing Trump to revoke humanitarian parole for more than half a million people. Anti-ICE protests, most of them peaceful, would break out in Los Angeles; Trump would send in the National Guard and seven hundred Marines over local and state officials’ objections. Back in Springfield, officials would sound budgetary alarms: stagnant and even declining income-tax revenues portended strain on the general fund and service cutbacks. The Court would allow the United States to deport migrants to countries they’d never seen while taking seriously the Trump administration’s attempts to ignore the constitutional protections for birthright citizenship. Brun, one of the musicians, would lead his first arena show, at Barclays Center in New York, at which the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, would take the stage, promising to stand up for Haitians. The following Monday, June 30, a district court would block the Trump administration’s attempt to end TPS for Haitians on August 3—giving its beneficiaries a reprieve of six months.
For now, at the John Legend Theater, the moment belonged to Dorsainvil. He stood at a podium, stage left, and gave an oration that was probably off the cuff and half-intended to stall but perhaps more moving for it. Things looked grim, he said, but the audience’s support allowed him to “see some light in the tunnel.” He said he wanted the Haitians in attendance to know they weren’t alone in their struggle. Alluding to the threat of mass deportations, Dorsainvil said, “When you go home, remember that there are folks in Springfield who used to stand with you. No matter what happens, we love Springfield, we’ll continue to love Springfield, and we’ll continue to work in Springfield. Because Springfield is that beautiful city, where we want to see everybody moving”—Dorsainvil paused before quoting the city motto—“forward together.”
The crowd reaction was emphatic. Some in the audience must have known that Dorsainvil was at risk of losing his immigration status in August. When the applause finally ended, Dorsainvil said, “I hope that those young ladies are ready.”
The high school dancers returned with another number.