Erika Lee, a woman from Springfield, Ohio, who initially made a Facebook post alleging that local Haitian immigrants were “eating pets,” leading to significant national attention on the small city, has confessed she had no direct evidence supporting such a claim.
Amid the 2024 presidential election where immigration is a hot topic issue, city officials have consistently debunked these rumors, but the claims gained even more prominence when former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, repeated them during the televised presidential debate on Tuesday night.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs—the people that came in,” Trump claimed about Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
While Springfield officials and community leaders have sought to dispel these claims, tensions have run high and bomb threats were made on Thursday and Friday, leading to the closures of schools and municipal buildings.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Lee told NBC News on Friday.
Lee said the incident has left her ridden with guilt and anxiety due to the controversy it generated. Her post detailed the disappearance of a neighbor’s cat and included her neighbor’s suspicions that their Haitian residents were involved in the incident.
According to NewsGuard, an organization dedicated to combating internet misinformation, Lee was one of the first to spread the baseless rumor on social media, the screenshots of which were widely shared. The neighbor, identified as Kimberly Newton, reportedly got the information about the alleged incident from a third party, as per NewsGuard’s findings and reported by NBC News.
Lee told NBC News that she never imagined her post would become part of the national conversation, while also spreading conspiracy theories and hate.
“I’m not a racist,” she said, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”
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After half a century of economic decline, Springfield worked hard to lure back the manufacturing industry. The plan worked and began creating jobs that ended up attracting immigrants. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have moved to the city, which had a population of just under 60,000 in 2020, over the space of four years, city officials say.
They are in the country legally, the City of Springfield’s Immigration FAQ page says, many under the Immigration Parole Program, which, under certain conditions, allows noncitizens to remain in the U.S. temporarily without meeting standard visa or immigration requirements.
Lee acknowledged that Springfield is grappling with issues triggered by the population surge that unexpectedly struck the city. She noted that Springfield was not ready to meet the challenges related to housing, health care and other services brought about by the rapid influx of new Haitian immigrants over the last five years. However, she did not foresee that her Facebook post could ignite a cycle of national news coverage.
“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield,” she told NBC News.
Lee also said that concerns for her child’s safety led her to withdraw her daughter from school, with the intense focus on her family making her worried. In addition, she admits to feeling apprehensive for the Haitian community, asserting that it was never her intention to demonize them.
“I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I was in the Haitians’ position, I’d be terrified, too, worried that somebody’s going to come after me because they think I’m hurting something that they love and that, again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance argues that Haitian migrants are still illegal because their legality has been achieved only “through the abuse of asylum laws.”
But in a NewsNation interview on Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said: “Under the current federal policy, they’re here legally and they’re here and there’s nothing that’s taking them out right away, so as a community, we’re trying to embrace them. I don’t want to, like, be too Pollyannish about this—there is a culture clash.”
Newsweek has emailed the Trump campaign Saturday morning for comment.
Trump has promised mass deportations as part of his election campaign for months, promising to bring in the Army and local law enforcement to remove millions of illegal immigrants.
On Friday, after the rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets had been debunked, the former president promised his mass deportation plan would begin in Springfield and Aurora, Colorado—two cities at the center of anti-immigration talk this week.
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” he said Friday afternoon. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”
Speaking at a press conference in Los Angeles, Trump also repeated claims of a Venezuelan gang takeover of Aurora and promised to send them “back to Venezuela.”
“The people of Colorado…you have a governor there who is very weak, he doesn’t know what to do,” he said.
In Aurora, apartment complexes did see problems with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, with members of the notorious group moving in and causing issues for Venezuelan residents and others.
The city’s mayor, Mike Coffman, told Newsweek last Friday that the story had gotten out of hand and that the gang was not in charge of apartment buildings. Police later identified members of the group known to them.
