Your support helps us to tell the story
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance tried to prove his baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets by pointing to a police report from one resident in Springfield, Ohio, that alleged her cat may have been stolen by her Haitian neighbors.
Turns out the cat, Miss Sassy, had been hiding in the basement the whole time, and Anna Kilgore had apologized to her neighbors for the mix-up with the help of a translation app, she told The Wall Street Journal this week.
Vance and his running mate Donald Trump, along with GOP allies, have spent days repeating baseless rumors that Haitian immigrants were stealing Springfield’s dogs and cats and eating them, in an effort to further push their hardline agenda on immigration.
The claims have been repeatedly debunked by Springfield’s police department, city officials and Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine. Local officials have also made it clear that Haitian immigrants who recently arrived in the city did so legally.
Trump even raised the conspiracy theory during last week’s presidential debate — and pushed back against a live fact-check by debate moderator, David Muir. “Well, I’ve seen people on television,” Trump replied. “People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food,’ so maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”
The WSJ also reported on Wednesday that Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck had told a Vance staffer directly on September 9 that the pet-eating rumors were not true, when he called to verify.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the WSJ. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
Vance had shared the conspiracy theory on X to his 1.9 million followers that day, and did not remove the post even after his staffer was told there was no truth to them.
The VP candidate has doubled down on the claims, telling CNN on Sunday that if he has to “create stories so that the America media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
When the WSJ asked Vance about the rumors this week, his campaign shared Kilgore’s police report from late August. The woman had told officers that she believed her Haitian neighbors may have stolen her cat. However, Kilgore told a WSJ reporter who visited her at home that she had discovered Miss Sassy in the basement a few days after filing the report.
A Vance spokesperson told The Independent the media is “ignoring” real concerns and “purposely twisting Senator Vance’s words.”
“Senator Vance has received countless messages from residents of Springfield on the disastrous effects Kamala Harris’s immigration policies have created for their hometown: a shortage of affordable housing, stressed public resources, declining public safety, and spikes in communicable disease,” the spokesperson wrote.
As the pet-eating rumors have spread, Springfield has faced an increasing number of threats. A bomb threat last Thursday forced the evacuation of city hall and two schools.
Local officials said the threat explicitly “used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.”
On Monday, two more schools in Springfield were evacuated while two nearby college campuses moved classes online and canceled on-campus events due to threats.
Haitians living in Springfield have said they’re afraid for their safety. Some parents had resorted to keeping children home from school, James Fleurijean, a Haitian community member, told ABC News.
Despite the pushback, a significant number of Republican voters have bought into the baseless claim.
A new poll from YouGov surveying voters after the Trump-Harris debate revealed that 52 percent of Trump voters said that the claim is “definitely” or “probably” true.
Some 81 percent of Harris voters said the claim is “definitely false.”
This story was updated on September 18 to include a statement from Vance’s spokesperson.
