The Springfield Police Division is dealing with a surge in bomb threats stemming from unsubstantiated claims about Haitian migrants. Daniel Aula, a Haitian immigrant living in Springfield, shares his story of fleeing violence in Haiti to find opportunity in Ohio, only to become entangled in the heated national debate on immigration.
Omar Jimenez, Caitlin Stephen Hu and Matthew Reynard, CNNThe Springfield Police Division has beefed up its staffing as it deals with bomb threats stemming from unsubstantiated claims about Haitian migrants.Daniel Aula is in his one room apartment praying, thankful he's alive, and thankful he's heading to work.
The image of a city dramatically altered by immigration has been seized upon by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance - who have made criticism of the Biden administration's immigration policy a cornerstone of their campaign. CEO Ross McGregor, whose family has been involved in manufacturing here for decades, has nothing but praise for his Haitian employees. To lose them would be a blow to his business, he told CNN. McGregor hired his first Haitian worker "three, four years ago" not because he sought them out specifically but because he needed dependable workers.
"I want to dispel one thing," he told CNN unprompted: "We don't bring in at a substandard wage and work them and pay them any less than we would any other employee," he said. "There are no Haitians that are taking anybody's jobs. I mean, if you want a job, you can get a job. And I just encourage people to have a little bit of empathy for where the Haitians are coming from.
The growing pains, however, were maybe encapsulated best by Springfield Mayor Rob Rue during a July 2024 City Commission meeting where he told a resident, "We were not in control of this." Maternal health care has been an especially poignant issue because of "poor prenatal care" in Haiti, he said. "You've got moms who are walking in the hospital that are in labor. They're ready to give birth in probably the next couple hours, and they've never had a single prenatal visit," Cook told CNN.
While Trump has claimed the influx brought "dangerous" criminality, Clark County Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Driscoll, a Republican, told CNN last month that was not the case. It's an issue that state officials have found hard to immediately tackle, given that adults in Ohio can test for a driver's license and receive it without having to go through a formal training program.
Regardless, the multilateral level of coordination across sectors has been "incredibly effective," she said. "It actually could probably be a master class of how any community needs to come together around, take any social issue, and work together to create a really good solution." Given Haiti's anarchial unrest in recent years, Haitians were added to a Biden-Harris administration parole program, limited to only a few countries, that allows vetted participants to enter the United States as long as they are sponsored by US residents.
Kersh said Haitians do hear Trump's comments about deportations, and even she "can't tell anyone that there's no likelihood that there could be some sort of mass enforcement action." But first, he made a stop with an immigration advocate to consider his options if there was any mass deportation effort that included him. He's been a little more nervous than usual lately.
A Springfield resident reported to police that she suspected her Haitian neighbors of chopping up her cat after finding "meat" in the backyard. "I had a call from one of Vance's staffers and asked, 'Hey, are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten by the immigrants in your community?' I said no," Heck told CNN. "It's a baseless claim," he added.
The DeWines fund a school in the dangerous Cité Soleil, an impoverished neighborhood in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince - an area entirely under gang control, where thousands of civilians live as a captive population. In 1970 the population in Springfield was around 82,000. The 2020 federal census showed a drop to around 58,000.
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