For the second day in row, multiple government buildings and schools in the town of Springfield, Ohio, were shuttered due to bomb threats. According to local officials, city staff received emails at 7:21 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. threatening several buildings.
The buildings evacuated and searched by bomb-sniffing dogs on Friday included Fulton Elementary School, Perrin Woods Elementary School, Cliff Park High School, Roosevelt Middle School, Springfield Academy of Excellence, the City Hall, a driver exam station and an Ohio License Bureau building. Several of these buildings were the targets of threats the previous day.
On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue (Republican) confirmed that the threats leading to the closure of City Hall and several other buildings “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
In response to the ongoing threats, police from across the state and even the FBI have descended on the “Rust Belt” city. Earlier in the week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (Republican) confirmed he would be surging Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to the town.
In an interview with NBC on Wednesday, Vilès Dorsainvil, president of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, confirmed that immigrants in the community “are scared for their lives.”
Dorsainvil added that a “friend told me he had family coming to visit him, but it seems that he is going to welcome them in Columbus or Dayton because it is not safe right now for him in Springfield.”
Local and national reporters have reported that Haitian immigrants within the community are scared to give interviews due to possible reprisals.
In an interview on Friday, Mayor Rue confirmed that “city staff members have spoken to some of [J.D.] Vance’s staff members to let them know that what we are seeing in the area is the result of some of these memes and the words that have been spoken about our town.”
Rue said he had not yet heard any response back from the Vance campaign about ceasing their vicious lies against community members.
There is no question that the ongoing threats in Springfield are the result of the ex-president and his running mate’s racist anti-immigrant rhetoric. In Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump devoted much of his airtime spreading racist lies about Haitians, specifically in the city of Springfield, Ohio, accusing them of eating family pets.
Trump and large sections of the ruling class are creating a climate of terror and violence, which he and his Republican allies hope to capitalize on to further their dictatorial agenda. With the 2024 election just over 50 days away, Trump and the Republican Party are promoting the “big lie” that “illegal immigrants” imported by “globalists” [a right-wing code word for Jews] via “Comrade Kamala” and “radical leftists” are ravaging animals, pets and innocent citizens. In the last several years, Trump’s “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric has led to the massacres of Jewish people, Hispanics and African Americans in Pennsylvania, Texas and New York.
Speaking at the White House on Friday, President Joe Biden briefly mentioned the attacks on Haitian immigrants without referring to Trump or the Republican Party by name. Stuttering through his remarks, Biden said, “I want to today take a moment to say something like so many Americans like Karine [Jean-Pierre] as she pointed out, a proud Haitian American, a community that is under attack in our country right now. Simply wrong. There is no place in America, this has to stop. What he’s doing, it has to stop.”
Far from stopping, Trump on Friday devoted nearly all of a 40-minute campaign speech in Rancho Palos Verdes, outside of Los Angeles at his golf club, to demonizing and inciting violence against immigrants. The aspiring dictator grunted and snorted:
Over the past three and half years, Kamala has resettled half a million illegal migrants from Haiti into American communities, including over 200,000 who Kamala has illegally flown into the United States by airplane when they couldn’t get through the border. They flew them in, right over the top of the border guards. And they are doing it right now. They are doing it right now.
Turning to Springfield, Ohio, Trump claimed:
20,000 illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life. They’ve destroyed … people don’t like to talk about it …
Trump accused Harris of turning “America into a poor violent refugee camp” that has left “the children of American citizens … at the mercy of barbaric criminals.”
After he delivered his fascist tirade, Trump took a few questions from the media. Questioned by a right-wing reporter if Trump would consider hosting an event in Springfield “to show the media what is actually happening,” Trump replied:
Well, we could and maybe we’ll do that. … Maybe Springfield, maybe Aurora [in Colorado]. Maybe both, we’ll go there. I can say this, we will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio. Large deportations, we are going to get these people out, we are bringing them back to Venezuela.
After promising to deport legal immigrants from Haiti to Venezuela, Trump added:
They emptied their jails in Venezuela, emptied their criminals, they emptied the nests, they call them nests of bad people. They are all now in the United States, and they are now taking over cities. It’s like an invasion from within. We are going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country, and we are going to start with Springfield and Aurora. Ok?
When a different reporter questioned Trump why he continued to “spread this false story” about “people eating pets” even as it has led to “bomb threats at schools” causing kids to be evacuated, Trump cut the reporter off and said:
No, no, no, no. The real threat is what’s happening at our border because you have thousands of people being killed by illegal migrants coming in. … Those are the real problems, not the problem you are talking about.
In a statement posted Friday, Socialist Equality Party candidate for president Joseph Kishore denounced the “anti-immigrant campaign spearheaded by Trump and his fascistic allies, with the complicity of Biden, Harris and the Democratic Party.”
Kishore said the “racist attacks on Haitian immigrants in Ohio, on Venezuelan immigrants in Aurora, Colorado, and on immigrants of every background are attacks on the entire working class.”
Kishore continued:
Trump is promoting and the Democrats are abetting the fascist provocation against immigrants in Springfield and elsewhere because they fear the threat that a united movement of the working class will direct its anger against capitalism.
COVID is spreading through schools and workplaces, killing 1,000 each week. Social inequality has never been higher. The US is escalating its war against Russia and is planning to strike deep within Russia with long-range missiles, an action that Russia says would bring the US directly into war with a nuclear-armed power. The US-backed genocide in Gaza continues unabated.
The strike at Boeing that began today—waged in defiance of the company, the Biden-Harris administration, and the IAM trade union apparatus—shows the immense social power of the working class. It also unites workers of all national backgrounds and ethnicities, demonstrating that all workers share the same interests.
The Socialist Equality Party and our campaign calls for the broadest mobilization in defense of the rights of immigrants. This is a strategic necessity in the fight for the international unity of the working class against capitalism and for an end to the nation-state system.