Vice Presidential hopeful J.D. Vance refused to back down from the falsehoods he and his running mate Donald Trump spread during the campaign about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, instead expressing frustration with local officials and their handling of the migrant crisis.
In an interview with New York Times opinion podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro released Saturday, Vance pushed back on whether or not he regretted his role in spreading rumors about Haitian migrants kidnapping cats and dogs and ate. This baseless conspiracy theory threw the city into turmoil, leading to bomb threats and school closures.
“It is shameful that American leaders are pretending to care more about these migrants than the people they took an oath to actually care for,” the Ohio senator said.
Some of those “American leaders” include Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, both Republicans, who have repeatedly debunked Trump and Vance’s claims.
Vance later said he was “not talking about Mike DeWine,” who has endorsed the Republican presidential ticket.
Asked whether the fallout from their false comments had been “worth it,” Vance said American citizens in Springfield faced rising housing costs, longer wait times for medical care and more students in public schools who did not speak English, which he said attributed to the influx of Haitian migrants into the city of about 60,000. He also denounced people who “do not have a legal right to be in this country,” even though Haitian immigrants in Springfield here are legally covered by the Immigration Parole Program, which grants them temporary protected immigration status.
Trump and Vance’s rhetoric on immigration — an issue that plays well with Republicans — has become increasingly nativist over the course of the campaign.
At a rally in Aurora, Colorado on Friday, Trump repeated false claims that a Venezuelan gang had “conquered” the Denver suburb, saying Vice President Kamala Harris had “imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of third place’. world…and she has beautifully resettled them in your community to prey on innocent American citizens.”
Trump has pledged to oversee the largest mass deportation in US history if elected, announcing a plan on Friday to invoke a 1798 law to remove gang-linked undocumented immigrants.
There were approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and Vance have repeatedly claimed the actual number is more than double that, though they have provided no credible evidence to support their claims.
Vance told Garcia-Navarro that it would be “reasonable” to deport about a million people a year. “I don’t think you need to deport them all,” he said, because policies that would tax remittances and potentially make it “harder for them to work” would result in “a lot of them” actually leaving prison ”. like to land.”
