‘Used as a pawn’: how the US election has poisoned Springfield, Ohio | US elections 2024

For decades, Springfield, a small city in Ohio, adjacent to a highway that runs from Maryland thousands of miles west to Utah, was a place where no one especially felt the need to visit.

But not today.

Today, random strangers with shotguns and bullets strapped around their torsos walk the city’s streets. In squares and on streets across Springfield, portable security cameras have sprung up.

Police officers and state troopers are deployed, sometimes in large numbers, to church services and city commission meetings that now draw lines of journalists, white supremacists and even a satirical JD Vance supporter.

As the former US president Donald Trump and others continue their demonization of immigrants, Springfield has become a metaphor for the mistruths some politicians are pushing five weeks out from America’s presidential election.

Adding to the growing sense of spectacle, Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate and close Donald Trump ally, came to Springfield on 19 September to hold a town hall, despite not holding or running for political office.

“I wanted to come see with my own eyes,” the known conspiracy theorist told a room of several hundred people, without specifying what that was, before adding: “We should have the largest mass deportation of immigrants in history because that’s what it means to stand for the rule of law.”

As soon as Ramaswamy was done talking to the people of Springfield, he was seated in front of a camera for an interview with Fox News.

Ramaswamy, who would like a cabinet position should Trump return to the White House, and is promoting a new book, isn’t the only politician appearing to use the Springfield story to grow their profile.

Kyle Koehler, a local Republican party member who’s running for a seat in Ohio’s senate in November, has found a national platform on rightwing media outlets by falsely claiming that an “entire wing of our regional hospital has nothing but Haitian patients being treated for HIV”.

Clark county recorded just 13 new cases of HIV in 2022, out of a general population of about 138,000 people, while the number of sexually transmitted diseases has been falling since 2018.

Other Springfield residents who have criticized immigrants, the city’s leadership and Democrats have also seen their national profiles take off.

Amid all this, on Saturday, a group of Haitian children playing in their own family garage had a gun pointed at them by a neighbor who entered their home. Already too afraid of their neighbors to play in their yard outside, the children thought they would be safe indoors. Local media reported that the family does not want to press charges against the alleged attacker, who also swore at the children, due to fears of reprisals.

“I’m terrified. If I’m at home, I should be at peace. If we’re not safe at home, where else are we going to be safe?” says Jacob Payen, who moved from Florida to Springfield three years ago. Born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, Payen says that when he and other Haitians met recently with representatives from the office of Mike DeWine, the Ohio governor, they were told to put together a security group within the community.

“The city has changed over the past month,” he says. “It’s not about Trump talking about pets any more. Now you have white supremacists declaring a war.”

He says his six-year-old son has been asking him if they eat cats and dogs because children at school have been asking him that.

“Springfield is definitely being used as a pawn,” says Staci Rhine, a professor of political science at Wittenberg University in Springfield. “The students are traumatized by the attention; they don’t want this. It’s painting an ugly picture that Springfield doesn’t need … that we don’t think is representative.”

Springfield is an ideal target for those pushing the narrative that today’s political class is responsible for the country’s ills. Its former leading employers – International Harvester, Crowell-Collier Publishing and other manufacturers – are long gone.

Its poverty rate is twice the national average while the number of Springfield residents with a college degree is 14% – one-third the US average. Springfield’s household income is about 56% the national average. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that between 2000 and 2014, no other metropolitan area in the United States lost more of its middle class than Springfield.

“The people blame the federal government and Bill Clinton for bringing in Nafta, which completely destroyed Springfield,” says Laura Rosenberger, the chair of the Clark county Republican party.

The net effect of Nafta on the US economy has been hotly contested, but one 2005 study suggested it cost Ohio about 50,000 blue-collar jobs.

So, when thousands of Haitian immigrants began moving to Springfield, opening businesses and reviving neighborhoods – as well as fueling significant concerns about their driving abilities – many longtime Springfield residents were retraumatized all over again as immigrants appeared to prosper while they were faced with rising housing costs and longer waiting times at local medical facilities.

At Ramaswamy’s town hall, one speaker complained that Haitians “even have nicer cars than us”.

Rosenberger says she doesn’t blame Haitians for what’s happening in Springfield.

“I hold the federal government, the Biden-Harris administration, responsible for abusing not only the American people, but the Haitians,” she says. “It’s not doing the Haitians any favor for the federal government to be doing this to them. They are as much of a victim.”

Rosenberger is glad that rumors on Facebook that antifa may be coming to Springfield this weekend may be false, as “antifa is classified as a terrorist organization, and we don’t want any terrorist organization in our city”.

Antifa is not a designated domestic terrorist organization nor even an actual single organized group.

However, Rosenberger said, she “didn’t know” whether far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, which have been in Springfield for weeks, were using the unrest for their own gain.

Regardless, the impact of the national spotlight is pulling the community apart.

A US navy veteran, Payen has lived in the US for more than two decades but came to Springfield, where he runs a store with his wife, because like many Haitians, he saw opportunities to work.

Several weeks ago, he says, two Black men walked into his store and told him to “go home” because they believed Haitians were taking food stamps and other support away from others. Payen says he believes that’s a direct consequence of the rhetoric that’s out there.

“The mayor is being supportive. The governor of Ohio is being very supportive, but JD Vance and former president Trump are still going on national TV pushing their agenda,” he says. “It’s a political agenda. It’s the electoral situation. They are doing it on purpose. We are being used as a target and now we have racist groups attacking us.”

But he and other leaders in Springfield’s Haitian community haven’t given up.

On Tuesday evening, Payen was one of the first speakers at the city commission meeting, telling of his experiences serving in the US military in the Persian Gulf and pleading for Springfielders to unite.

“We don’t want any problem with any other community,” he says. “We just came here to work, to have a better life.”