Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio?

Nazi Lies in Vance's America

In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians.

Its origins are in racist fantasy. During the last presidential campaign, JD Vance, then the vice-presidential nominee, put the Haitians of Springfield at the center of national attention. Temporary Protected Status had been granted to non-citizen Haitians in the US after an earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people; it was extended after the Haitian president was assassinated. This allowed ten thousand or more Haitians to gather in Springfield, a small city between Dayton and Columbus, and to work. Vance heard about Haitians in Springfield, from a city manager who wanted federal assistance for housing. He turned a reasonable request into a racial crusade.

In a speech of 10 July 2024, Vance claimed that “Springfield, Ohio has been overwhelmed” by Haitian immigrants. Although there was certainly friction over schools and housing, there was no basis for such a judgement. In fact, Springfield was doing better economically than in any moment in Vance’s lifetime. In the months to follow, he would return to the theme, publishing a number of inflammatory claims about Haitians in Springfield, not a single one of which was true. As we will see, Vance’s goal was not so much to get individual lies on the record; it was rather to create a self-sustaining story, in which a real place and its real people could become the raw material for an alternative Nazi reality -- I use the word advisedly. Vance had help in expanding his theme, and crucial helpers were Nazis.

In American terms, Haitians are Black; and the American group Blood Tribe are white-supremacist blood-obsessed Nazis. After Vance’s speech, Blood Tribe took its cue. Blood Tribe had marched in other cities in the previous two years, wearing masks, distinctive uniforms, and carrying banners with swastikas. These marches were unmistakably Nazi. Vance’s speech drew the attention of Blood Tribe to Springfield. On 10 August 2024, members of Blood Tribe carried out their usual performance in the city’s downtown, two of them carrying banners with swastikas and another two brandishing automatic rifles. Mayor Rob Rue called the march “an attempt to disrupt our community by an outside hate group.” Blood Tribe responded on social media: “We hear that you have a real problem with Haitian ‘refugees.’”

And from whom did they “hear” this? JD Vance.

Later that month, a local Springfield (self-described) social media influencer named Anthony Harris attended a meeting of the Springfield City Commission. He claimed that Haitians were “flipping cars in the middle of the street,” which was not the case. He then introduced a colorful new element to Vance’s image of a Springfield “overwhelmed” with refugees. He claimed that Haitians went to Springfield parks, seized ducks by the necks, cut off their heads, and then devoured the headless fowl. This was untrue.

Five Blood Tribe members also attended that same 27 August City Commission meeting. One of the Nazis, Drake Berentz, stood up to say that “I come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you are doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian that you bring in.” Haitians had been living in Springfield for years. The only novelty was that Vance had drawn attention to them. After the City Commission meeting, Blood Tribe took to the internet to spread the lie that “Haitians eat the ducks out of city parks.”

This business of purported animal abuse would become very important. A month later a version of the story would be spread to tens of millions of people by a former (and future) president of the United States, who would use a tale of barbarism as a justification for a “large deportation.”

The question of who is human and who is not can be defined by animals. In a predominantly rural society, the claim that people are beasts is a suggestion that they can be slaughtered. This is a frequent theme in histories of mass killing, such as the Holodomor (the Stalinist political famine) in Ukraine, or for that matter the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an urban or suburban setting, in which animals are companions, the idea that others mistreat animals can be the signal that they are not like us, barbarians, not fully human. Among the many other accelerating repressions, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep pets at home. In the US, the slur of eating pets has traditionally been applied to Asians. The idea that Black people eat the wrong things in the wrong way is a staple of American racism.

In early September 2024, a Springfield woman posted on Facebook about a lost cat. She had heard from someone who had heard from someone else who had heard from yet someone else that a cat had been abducted and eaten by Haitians. The story had no basis. But once online, it could be used, and it was. The fascist-friendly Twitter account @EndWokeness posted that “ducks and pets are disappearing,” with a screenshot of the cat post and a photo of a man holding a Canada goose. The photo was taken in another city, and the man in the image complained that his image was being used in a campaign of lies. The baseless notion that Haitians were mistreating or killing animals, spread to make them seem like barbarians, was quickly shared by prominent far-right figures such as Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk.

When Vance then posted about Haitians on 9 September 2024, two months after his first speech, a circle was closed. He had drawn attention to Springfield, including the attention of Nazis. This led to the portrayal Haitians as criminals and barbarians. Vance now repeated the specific claims, to which he himself had given the general impulse, as evidence that his initial slander had been true. “Reports now show,” he wrote, “that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”

There were no such reports; there was only the campaign of aggression that Vance himself had initiated. Cat-eating now became a favorite topic among national elected Republican officials. Often this took a joking tone, with cat memes. This levity is a tactic of the on-line far right: even as we demean other people and deny their humanity, it is all somehow just a joke. But of course the consequences are real: an advocate of the Haitian community was harassed after Vance’s post.

This was just the beginning. The alternative reality that Vance and Nazis co-created was bleeding into the real world. The next day was the presidential debate between Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee, and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

On the stage in Philadelphia on 10 September 2024, before a national televised audience of sixty-seven million people, Trump led with racial abuse of Haitians in Springfield: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening in our country and it’s a shame.” One of the moderators pointed out that there was no evidence for any such claim. Trump then said that he had seen “people on television” complaining that their dogs had been eaten. There were no such television reports.

After the debate, Vance revealed what he was doing: saying one thing that was not true (the pets) in the service of spreading even bigger lies (some general catastrophe). He essentially granted to an interviewer that the story about cats and dogs was not true, but “whatever the case may be,” it was legitimate to spread that false claim because it drew attention to the general “carnage” in Springfield, of which of course there was none. Vance’s stance might be summarized thus: “Where there is the smoke that I made up, then there must also be the fire that I also made up.” In other settings, Vance was more specific than “carnage,” claiming increased rates of disease and crime. All of these claims were also baseless and false.

A spurious alternative reality, built from Nazi marches, internet memes, and Vance’s and Trump’s lies was consciously created and spread. The day after the presidential debate, the leader of the Nazi group Blood Tribe understandably declared victory, expressing his pride that Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.”

Ohio politicians began to respond. Governor Mike DeWine spoke up to contain the lies that Vance and others had spread. DeWine acknowledged the very real challenges created by rapid immigration to schools and housing, and described state-level measures designed to address them. He described the Haitian immigrants as a “positive influence.” He elaborated: “People who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.” Mike DeWine, who was born in Springfield, knew what he was talking about. But he was reaching thousands of people. Social media had reached millions, Trump tens of millions. The damage had been done.

Vance’s Nazi-propelled propaganda had won. And a propaganda victory of this sort, involving degrading claims about crime, barbarism, and disease, can lead directly to threats and violence. Two days after the presidential debate, Blood Tribe doxed Springfield residents, while several public buildings in Springfield had to be closed due to bomb threats, at least one of which involved hate speech about Haitians. The day after that, on 13 September 2024, three Springfield schools had to be closed after bomb threats. Amidst the chaos that he himself had sown, Vance blamed the immigrants and Kamala Harris.

Having created the problem, Trump and Vance had a “solution,” That same day, Trump claimed that immigrants had “destroyed” Springfield, and promised that, were he to become president, he would order an ethnic purge of the city: “I can say this, we will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio — large deportations. We’re going to get these people out.” Trump’s words were as magnetic as Vance’s: on 28 September, the Nazis of Blood Tribe returned to Springfield, this time waving a swastika flag in front of the mayor’s house.

The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a response to something, rather than a simple choice to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.

First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids that will, in fact, wreck an improving local economy. And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which it appears that we are about to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”

Hitler gave very specific propaganda guidance in Mein Kampf: a Nazi leader should tell a lie so big that his people cannot accept that they could be deceived on such a scale. And that is one logic, for those predisposed to believe a cat-eating-scale liar like Vance and to accept that the violence was justified. Others, those who do not trust Vance, might still find it hard to believe that their own government, however untrustworthy, is really about to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation just because Nazis march and the vice-president messages.

But if we lose time in incredulity, we risk becoming complicit. Once a big lie has led to violence, violence in which we are implicated because it is our government, it becomes harder to deny the initial lies — we do not want to think that we are complicit in an act of state terror that was based on absolutely nothing except Vance’s lies and Nazi marches. And so some kind of resistance now, even if it is not completely effective, is not only politically but ethically very important.

One answer to a big lie, to a Nazi alternative reality, are the small truths. When I visited Ohio in October 2024, after the presidential debate, and then again in October 2025, I was told that the narrative imposed by Vance and Trump on Springfield was irritating and wrong. To be sure, Springfield had problems, like most cities in my home state. But when I stopped there last October, my impressions were in line with what the Ohio governor has been saying. The city is clearly on the upswing.

When I was growing up in the area, Springfield was much rougher than it is now. When I was finishing middle school, in 1983, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to Springfield, a gentle case study of the decline of the American dream. When I was in high school, the city (still) had two high schools, and so two football teams, which meant that I visited several times (to watch). It was a tricky town. Things got worse in the 1990s, as the main local employer, International Harvester cut back production, and industry in nearby Dayton also retreated. Between 1999 and 2014, median income in Springfield fell by more than in any other metropolitan area in the country. By 2012, Springfield self-rated as the unhappiest city in the land, and in 2016 it was presented in national media as the nadir the rust belt trajectory. But the city presented itself as a good place to do business, and in 2017 a big Japanese auto parts maker moved in. And suddenly there were more jobs than people seeking them. Soon the Haitians, who could legally work, starting coming.

By the 2020s, the city has visibly improved. The downtown, which had gone almost dark, is much more bright and functional: the Museum of Art and the Heritage Center Museum are still inviting, and there are good restaurants in the center — in part thanks to Haitians. Looking out into the sunshine of a perfect fall day from the pavilion of a Mexican place, it seemed grotesque to imagine that restaurants and other sites of employment could be raided by federal agents, that the city could be laid to waste on the lying logic that it had already been laid to waste. There was nothing here, nothing among the small truths of Springfield, that could justify such an action.

But even as I was visiting Springfield last fall, Vance’s mendacity was doing its political work. The fiery racial lies were becoming cold bureaucratic power. A few weeks later, in late November, the federal government took the actions necessary to establish the institutional preconditions for an ethnic cleansing of Springfield. In late November of last year, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unpersuasive finding of improved conditions in Haiti. This was the step needed to deprive Haitians of the official Temporary Protected Status that allows them to live and work legally in the United States. Read attentively, the text reveals that conditions in Haiti remain disastrous. At most, there is some weak gesturing towards the future possibility of some improvement — which, in normal times, would be obviously insufficient to deprive Haitians of their status. There is no sense of such improvement in State Department documents, such as the current travel advisory strongly discouraging Americans from visiting Haiti.

The concluding claim of the finding is that the presence of Haitians “is contrary to the US national interest.” This assertion, which is presented as dispositive of all other issues, goes unexplained and undefended. What national interest, exactly? How? The only answer is a vague reference to Trump’s beliefs. In the context of the previous events, the meaning is clear enough. The president and the vice-president have repeated that Haitians eat domestic animals, cause diseases, commit violent crimes, and wreck cities. These very specific dicta about Haitians originated with JD Vance and American Nazis. Given the lack of any other explanation, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the motive of the policy is the racial hatred expressed by the president and the vice-president.

This expression of state of mind is one reason why, should a major ICE operation go forward in Springfield, it would be the ethnic cleansing of an American city. To be sure, the appearance of racial difference drives ICE raids all over the country. But in this case we have a particularly clear trail from public racism to practical policy. This is what lawyers and historians concerned with genocide try to ascertain: was there the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”? It is not easy to settle questions of intent, or of genocide generally; but the expression of racial fantasy about “carnage,” “destruction,” and barbarism by the vice-president and the president weighs on one side of the scale.

Today begins Black History Month. This Saturday there will be an open house at Gammon House, Springfield’s museum of the Underground Railroad. What will happen between now and then? Absent a court decision or a change of attitude by the White House, the Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status will expire on Tuesday (3 February) at 11:59pm. Springfield local authorities believe that an ICE surge will begin on Wednesday (4 February) and last for thirty days. The governor has said the same.

And some local people are responding. Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, asked the “silent majority” who supports the local Haitian population to speak up. A conservative couple took up the challenge by gathering more than a thousand signatures for the extension of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status. On Thursday 29 January, in a Springfield church, people gathered for an information session about their rights. Mayor Rue initiated on Tuesday 27 January a resolution in the City Commission, asking that ICE agents respect local rules and norms. The specific concern was that ICE agents would be masked and could not be identified. In the course of the last month, of course, two Americans have been shot dead by agents carrying out raids. One of the victims was Alex Pretti, a nurse. On 27 January, the Ohio Nurses Association, in an open letter to Ohio’s Congressional delegation, called for all funding for federal immigration enforcement to be halted.

Up until now, the major ICE raids have taken place in states and cities with reliable Democratic majorities. In Springfield, Ohio, the politics would be different. Republicans dominate a wildly gerrymandered Ohio state legislature. Ohio’s two Republican United States senators are unlikely to contradict the president on his signature issue. Mayor Rue and Governor DeWine unsurprisingly say that the law is the law; even these local and state-level Republicans, for whom the issue is close at hand, cannot be expected to use a language of opposition. That said, their expressions of concern are unmistakable; and, in DeWine’s case, thoughtful and detailed. Dewine is far more informed about both Springfield and Haiti than Vance, Trump, Kristi Noem, or anyone else involved in the process.

DeWine disputed the two justifications given by the Department of Homeland Security for the federal action: that Haiti is safe and that Haitians in Springfield somehow compromise “national security.” He said that the decision to remove their Temporary Protected Status as “wrong.” His description of Haiti is, sadly, quite accurate: “it’s extremely violent, the economy’s in shambles, the government does not function, the police are virtually worthless.” He contradicts the Department of Homeland Security finding: “it doesn’t qualify as the situation changing for the better in Haiti.” DeWine is an informed observer. He and his wife Fran DeWine helped to fund a school in Haiti, named in honor of their deceased daughter, Becky. This charitable effort became unsustainable in 2024.

The direction of federal deportation policy really rests on claims about Springfield. Here DeWine’s statement was equally clear: “But probably more important for the United States and the people of Ohio, is that the Temporary Protected Status, if it goes away next week, it’s going to mean that you have thousands of Haitians who are working, contributing members of the community, contributing to the economy, who one day will be able to work, and who the next day will not be able to work. Springfield and Clark County are coming back, they’ve been doing a very very good job. It’s an upward movement. Part of that upward movement comes about because, frankly, of Haitians who are working and contributing to the economy and buying things and opening restaurants and doing all the things that working people (do). These people are working, and they’re hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake, it is not in the best interest of Ohio, for these individuals who are workers and working to lose that status.”

Still, the thin, cold guillotine of bureaucratic language descends, from Washington DC to Columbus and Springfield: “A federal list of individual removal orders has been identified in Springfield as an initial focus for enforcement activity.” Public employees in Springfield have just read these chilling words. DeWine’s description helps us to imagine the realization, in an actual city, of this bureaucratic language. There are at least ten thousand men, women, and children who will be subject to arrest and deportation. These are those men and women at work, “who one day will be able to work, and the next day will not be able to work” -- the end of Temporary Protected Status means that people who try to work will be seized in their workplaces, and if not seized in their home.

Those are adults; we also have to imagine the children. Roughly twenty percent of the children in Springfield Public Schools do not have documentation that would establish their citizenship. All of these boys and girls, about fifteen hundred children, are vulnerable. As in other cities, they can be taken from schools and away from their parents, or return home to find their parents gone. Springfield churches are preparing right now for that very situation. The city employees who received that memo about the “removal orders” and the “initial focus of enforcement activity” were the teachers. The Ohio Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, “strongly opposes” any presence of ICE agents in schools, which “undermines trust, disrupts learning, and creates trauma for children and families.”

Sad though it is to contemplate, trauma is a goal of ethnic cleansing. The stages that we have seen in Ohio are all too familiar: the fiction of the subhuman enemy; the false details that are used to introduce the stereotypes; the organized use of the propaganda of racial hatred in media; the capture of government by people involved in all this; and then finally the application of violence to thousands of human bodies. At every stage we will be offered the reasons that we should find this normal: on the one side, the fiery talk about subhumans; on the other, the frozen bureaucratic passive-voice institutional boilerplate suggesting that all is normal and inevitable and that no one need take personal responsibility for what is simply happening and must happen.

The violence, once it comes, changes normality: first of all, for the people who are rounded up and held in the concentration camps we call “detention centers,” preparatory to being sent either somewhere they do not want to go, or dying in custody. And this leaves trauma among the survivors in the most obvious, incontestable sense. But everyone who observes also partakes in the trauma. The kids who remain in Springfield schools after their friends disappear will need to tell themselves something. Their parents will need to think of what to tell them. Everyone around has to ask how it came to this. The trauma becomes a political resource. The perpetrators of an ethnic cleansing use the emotion to reshape how we see our neighbors — and ourselves. Most people, I expect, will be appalled by what they see in Springfield. The ethnic cleanser, though, rules with the help of those who are not, those who comply, agree, take part. And in this way ethnic cleansing itself is a step away from democracy and towards minority rule by a police state served by those willing to wear the mask.

Those who dispense the trauma are aware of what they are doing. In this whole Springfield story, it is the statements of Blood Tribe and the the vice-president that reveal the most self-awareness. They are guiding a process that they recognize, understand, and approve: the generation of an alternative reality with a clear definition of the detestable other, and then the mobilization of state power to eliminate that imagined enemy. If this process is completed, as there is every sign that it will be, they will have succeeded: and they too will be altered. Blood Tribe, and groups like them, will have seen how they can move the national conversation and the federal government.

After a Springfield pogrom, JD Vance will have his first namesake policy. Although he has been outspoken during the first year of the Trump administration, and has gotten himself in the way of various endeavors, there is, as of yet, no clear instance of a policy of which he is the author and the executor. The ethnic cleansing of Springfield would be the first. “JD Genocide,” or perhaps “Genocide Vance” -- if all this happens, the sobriquets will write themselves.

And what history will the rest of us write for ourselves? When we are confronted with street terror, concentration camps, and mass deportations, as now in the United States, the thought of historical precedents arises — and is usually suppressed. “It can’t happen here,” we think, so this must not be “it.” When we take the focus down from the national to the local, to the story of Springfield, this is a bit harder to maintain. The “it” is right there in front of our faces.

We confront no historical analogy, but actual twenty-first century Nazis who took action in the public sphere, shaped the public conversation, and are getting the policy outcome that they desired. As the mayor noted after Blood Tribe marched in Springfield, the aim was to “disrupt the community” — and now that disruption can take on a catastrophic scale. Blood Tribe, Vance and Trump appeal not to someone else’s racism in some other time and place, but to American racism, right here and now.

Indeed, having followed the genealogy of events in Springfield, we might find ourselves more open to broader interpretations of what is happening around us, at a national level. After all, the social media feeds of the Department of Homeland Security are ever less distinguishable from those of Blood Tribe, and of course incomparably more influential. The motives given for the deportation operations as a whole, the notion of “criminal aliens” and the like, are essentially those of Springfield writ large. Springfield, far from being the exception, might help us to see the general rule. When I see masked ICE agents I can’t help remembering the masks of Blood Tribe -- and asking myself if there might be some overlap in personnel...

For me, as a historian of atrocity who was raised in Ohio, it is uncanny to consider this evidence. Usually I am reading the sources years or decades after the fact, not along with the events themselves. Usually I visit sites of memory, not cities at risk, which is what Springfield is right now. I wish that what I know about other times and places was not quite so applicable. But insofar as is historical patterns are of any use, it is in naming what might well happen before it does happen -- which, perhaps, makes the horror less likely.

An ICE surge in Ohio is not inevitable. Trump could stop his promised “large deportation.” Perhaps Vance or Kristi Noem could stop it. It can be halted, by a court ruling tomorrow, Monday the second of February.

And if the horror is not stopped, it can at least be resisted, recorded, given its place in history by those with the courage to be present and to speak about what they see. And the seeing, just the seeing, is of huge importance, for all of us. When we see, we can feel and we can act. We can empathize, communicate, shelter, protest, help.

For a sense of how people in Springfield are preparing, or how you might help, please follow the links in the final paragraph.

In this essay I cite local reporting from the Dayton Daily News, the Ohio Capital Journal, and the Springfield News-Sun. Please consider following the links to subscribe.