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Before J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, spread xenophobic lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the Haitian Times, a newspaper based in New York that covers Haiti and that country’s diaspora, was already planning to visit the town, part of a multicity listening tour to connect with the communities that it seeks to cover. “Initially we didn’t want to report it, because we’re very mindful about amplifying lies and false rhetoric,” Macollvie Neel, the editor of the paper, said of Vance’s remarks. “We made a conscious decision not to even touch it.” Then Trump parroted the same lies during the presidential debate on ABC. Chaos followed. Springfield schools and municipal buildings received bomb threats, forcing them to shut down. Haitian residents faced all manner of assault and harassment. One woman reported to the Times that she woke up to find acid thrown on her vehicle and the windows smashed. Soon, the paper itself was attacked: Neel received messages calling her racial slurs, and her home was “swatted”––the practice of calling police officers to a location as a hoax. (CNN previously reported on the swatting incident.)
The Times began its cross-country tour eighteen months ago, as a means of getting in touch with diaspora communities outside of the typical coastal enclaves of Florida, New York, and Massachusetts where Haitian immigrants have traditionally settled. Primarily, the events were designed to listen to the concerns of participants, who would often describe incidents that sounded like assault or discrimination. One Haitian man in Indianapolis approached a resident in his yard to offer help; the resident pulled out a gun. Other incidents involved the wrongful denial of housing and online attacks. The Times, in turn, reported on these incidents, adding context about racist anti-immigrant tropes, failures of government, and sociocultural interactions. They created a series called “Haitians in America,” devoted to individuals’ experiences.
“I saw that there was a disconnect between what people thought were hijinks, pranks, people being nasty online or looking at them funny, and the structural racism that exists in this country,” Neel said. “Because the stuff that was aggravated harassment, intimidation––a lot of it sounded like hate crimes to me.” As part of its tour, the Times partnered with the NAACP on events to inform attendees about how to report incidents. “We have a version of racism in Haiti—we have colorism, of course—but it plays out a little bit differently,” Neel said. “For folks who come in, who are just wanting to work, make some money, and take care of their families, they’re not really attuned to social justice issues or spending a lot of time pursuing respect for their civil rights.”
Since the Vance and Trump attacks, the Times’ webmaster has been responsible for moderating and removing hundreds of harassing comments posted on the paper’s articles online—a traumatic task in itself. As Neel was telling me about the ninety-two comments under one article about the threats that Haitian residents of Springfield were experiencing, she paused to send a “quick note” to the webmaster, who is based in Haiti, about removing more comments with racial slurs. “Some of this stuff he doesn’t even realize is rooted in racism, all these dog whistles,” she said.
“I think when you’re a new immigrant and Black, you really don’t understand all the ways racism works [in America],” Garry Pierre-Pierre, the publisher and founder of the Haitian Times, told me—especially in the small, predominantly white towns that have become a more economically feasible landing place for Haitian immigrants than big cities. With the “Haitians in America” series and the listening tour, staff at the Times are seeking to spend more time inland. “We know a lot of people are going straight to Indiana, going to Kentucky, rural Connecticut, rural South Carolina, where there’s just a lot of jobs, anywhere there’s an Amazon warehouse,” Neel said. “Those are the types of stories we wanted to follow.”
Back in Springfield, Neel and her team held their event, albeit virtually; local police couldn’t guarantee the meeting’s safety. Before Trump and Vance made their remarks, the session was intended to focus on infrastructure strains in the community—a topic that the paper has often encountered in its reporting. In recent years, almost twenty thousand people have arrived in Springfield, a town of just under sixty thousand. But the agenda for the meeting changed. “Once all these bomb threats and the pets and cats or whatever started going on, it was clear that the focus had to be on providing information about racism,” Neel said.
She invited Sharon Wright Austin, a professor of African American studies at the University of Florida, to discuss the long history of anti-Black immigration policies and how Haitian immigrants specifically have triggered their creation or been used as test cases. “A lot of the people in Springfield who are not really familiar with the way things are in America are maybe thinking, Wow, they hate us,” Wright Austin said at the start of her presentation. “But it’s not just your group. This is something that’s typical of the way immigrants of color have been treated.” Wright Austin, who has taught classes on Caribbean migration, used almost half of the ninety-minute session to chart a history of the different waves of Haitian migration to the US.
“I always say to the team here that in the national discourse in America, so much time covering immigration and policy is spent on who gets in the door and who has to stay back,” Neel said. “To me, the story of immigration, a lot of it, doesn’t even start until you are inside America.” Assimilation and the meeting of different cultures has always fascinated her the most. “This is where people are making sacrifices to build an entire new life, and this is where you have the people who were born here getting a new opportunity to decide what kind of person they want to be,” she says.
In recent days, the intense national spotlight on the Haitian community in Springfield has dimmed somewhat, but it is still making headlines: among other stories, two organizations that represent Haitian diaspora groups are now suing Vance and Trump for violations of civil rights. Tonight, Vance will take his turn on the debate stage; Springfield could easily come up again. Whatever happens, the Times will be covering America’s Haitian diaspora long after the election-year glare subsides.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, the lawyer representing New York mayor Eric Adams in the corruption case against him derided prosecutors’ “little press conferences” and convened one of his own to make the case that Adams did nothing wrong. (Pressed on one apparently incorrect statement about conflict-of-interest law, the lawyer said, “I am not an expert in conflict of interest board law.”) Meanwhile, for New York magazine, Noah Shachtman went inside “the secretive alliance” between Adams and the New York Post, which, in a sense, made Adams mayor and now “can’t quite quit the man it was so instrumental in elevating.” And the New York Times paid for Sarah Lyall, one of its reporters, to retrace one of the luxury trips that Adams made to Turkey, allegedly in exchange for political favors. (By chance, the Wi-Fi password in the Turkish Airlines lounge at JFK was “TKNYCADAMS.”)
- Last week, Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist on Substack, published a dossier from inside Donald Trump’s presidential campaign that was apparently stolen by Iranian hackers. (Several major news outlets were offered the dossier but declined to publish it, citing its lack of newsworthiness.) After Klippenstein linked to the dossier on X, the platform curbed its circulation and temporarily banned his account—a ban that Klippenstein now says is permanent; over the weekend, he wrote that platforms owned by Meta and Google (up to and including the latter’s Drive service) have blocked the dossier, too. Substack, for its part, has stood by Klippenstein; yesterday, its cofounder Hamish McKenzie discussed the controversy with Klippenstein in a video interview.
- Ahead of the vice presidential debate between Vance and Tim Walz on CBS, CJR’s Meghnad Bose and the Tow Center’s Dhrumil Mehta explored how much the major cable networks have been covering the candidates in recent weeks. In spreading the lie about Haitians eating pets in Ohio, Vance may have “succeeded at drawing media attention to his campaign’s talking points,” Bose and Mehta write. By contrast, interest in Walz “has largely tapered off, and he has all but stopped doing interviews with national media,” per Bose and Mehta, but “the vice presidential debate may offer Walz a chance to reintroduce himself—if he can overcome Vance’s knack for drawing the spotlight.”
- Also for CJR, Yona TR Golding reports on legal and regulatory complaints that a coalition of left-wing Israeli human rights organizations has filed accusing Channel 14—a right-wing TV network known for its support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—of airing broadcasts “in which pundits and guests have called for war crimes, including genocide, against Palestinians.” (A Channel 14 spokesperson described the allegation as “grossly defamatory” and “politically motivated.”) Israel’s attorney general will now have to decide whether to open a criminal probe based on the complaint.
- And the satirical site The Onion, which is under new ownership, is bringing back its satirical “Onion News Network,” which parodies cable news, with a real-life cable-news anchor in the chair: Joshua Johnson, formerly of MSNBC. “Johnson said he isn’t just there for the laughs,” the Washington Post’s Will Sommer reports. “Instead, he’s hoping his ONN segments prod real journalists to reconsider why some media outlets—pompous and disconnected from their audiences—are so easily parodied.”
