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When Mirlesna Azor-Sterlin heard former president Donald Trump repeat the lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets during his debate with Kamala Harris, she was reminded of her job as an educator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We teach our students to — when they’re writing papers in class — to really have the facts right, the evidence,” she told The Independent on a Thursday evening in a suburban neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. She was surprised that Trump and Vance failed to do the same.
The story was repeatedly debunked until Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, admitted himself that the story was made up.
“Repeating something just for the sake of repeating it is the tactic there. Without any factual evidence, continuously to repeat it is a choice,” Azor-Sterlin added.
The Trump-Vance campaign, however, has doubled down on the sentiment even after admitting the story was false. Vance repeatedly slammed Haitian migrants during a campaign stop in Raleigh this week which drew protesters. Specifically, he claimed that the people currently residing in Springfield, Ohio are not legal immigrants because they gained legal status through either Temporary Protected Status or humanitarian parole during the Biden administration.
“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going call them an illegal alien,” Vance said to applause at Union Station in Raleigh. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.”
Many people associate Haitian migrants with coastal states like Florida or, now, Ohio. But Haitians live in numerous states, including potential battleground states. According to the US Census Bureau, an estimated 31,000 people who claim Haitian descent live in Georgia; about 35,000 claim Haitian ancestry in Pennsylvania.
North Carolina has more than 15,000 people who claim Haitian ancestry.
“We are small but mighty here in this community. Most of us are transplants and moved from states like New York or Massachusetts or Florida,” Azor-Sterlin, who works with Haitians of the Triangle, said. “So we're trying to organize, and by organizing I mean building our community, so we have resources, so we have each other in moments like this that we can pull from.”
Dafney Tales-Lafortune, who runs the Carolina Hatian Women Society, came to North Carolina from Massachusetts in 2017. She said she wanted to create a positive organization.
“So we tried very much to assemble and and just create a community, and of course, my goal is always to center women, Haitian women,” she told The Independent. “We are embedded into this country. We've helped weave the fabric, building this country. Let's be honest about that, about the contributions of Haitians and Haitian Americans.”
Tales-Lafortune compared the recent demonization of Haitian migrants in Ohio to the claims in the 1980s and the 1990s that Haitians were bringing HIV and AIDS to the United States.
“Every so often, there's some kind of denigration of Haitians,” she said. Indeed, Vance has blamed migrants for the “massive rise in communicable diseases” in Springfield on X/Twitter.
“After all this time, we've been here for generations, we are in all sorts of industries and professions,” Tales-Lafortune said, adding that she is “exhausted and frustrated” by claims such as Vance’s.
Like in Springfield, Haitians helped revive parts of North Carolina, such as Mount Olive, a town about an hour outside of Raleigh. An article by WUNC noted that many Haitians went to work for Butterball turkey’s plant in the region after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti created a number of refugees.
Tales Lafortune said that Haitians fit the type of immigrant that Republicans should champion. But because they are Black, she believes, they are not talked about in turns of the American Dream or a typical GOP success story.
“You would think we are aligned in that way,” she said. “But it still doesn't matter, because we don't look the way you want. When you have people who are trying to preserve this country for themselves and against this imaginary threat, it doesn't matter how much they're aligned [ideologically].”
Despite this, Tales Lafortune said that the community has been welcomed in the state.
“Haitians are hard-working, we are synonymous with hard work,” she said.
Azor-Sterlin for her part said that Vance and Trump’s claims have only made the Haitian community more determined to mobilize to vote.
“Our voices matter, especially the ones who can vote,” she said. “And we are actively participating in activities, in events, combating false narratives through education, through conversation.”
She noted that some Haitians showed up to protest against Vance proudly waving the Haitian flag. Many Haitians did the same during Trump’s rally in New York.
Now, it is up to Trump and Vance to see how many do the same at the ballot box.
