Vice presidential hopeful JD Vance refused to walk back on the falsehoods he and his running mate Donald Trump have peddled on the campaign trail 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 against questions of whether or not he regretted his role in helping spread rumors about Haitian migrants abducting and eating cats and dogs. This baseless conspiracy theory plunged the city into turmoil, leading to bomb threats and school closures.
“It is disgraceful that American leaders pretend they care about these migrants more than they care about the people they took an oath of office to actually look after,” the Ohio senator said.
Some of those “American leaders” include Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, both Republicans, who have repeatedly debunked Trump’s and Vance’s claims.
Vance later said he was “not talking about Mike DeWine,” who has endorsed the Republican presidential ticket.
Asked if the fallout from their false comments had been “worth it,” Vance said American citizens in Springfield were facing rising housing costs, longer wait times for medical care and more students in public schools who do not speak English, which he attributed to the influx of Haitian migrants to the city of about 60,000. He also slammed people who “don’t have the legal right to be in this country,” though Haitian immigrants in Springfield are here legally under the Immigration Parole Program, which grants them temporary protected immigration status.
Trump and Vance’s rhetoric about immigration — an issue that polls well for Republicans — has grown increasingly nativist over the course of the campaign.
During 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 the third world … and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump has promised to oversee the largest mass deportation in U.S. history if elected and on Friday announced a plan to invoke a 1798 act to remove gang-affiliated undocumented immigrants.
There were about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as of 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and Vance have repeatedly asserted the actual number is more than double that, though they have not provided credible evidence to back their claims.
Vance told Garcia-Navarro it would be “reasonable” to deport about a million people per year. “I don't think you have to deport every single one of them,” he said, because policies that would tax remittances and potentially make it “harder for them to work” would cause “a lot of them” to “actually leave the country willingly.”
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