JD Vance on Tuesday doubled down on his xenophobic claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, insisting that while the specifics of a bizarre conspiracy theory about pet-eating migrants he endorsed may “turn out to be false,” it represents the real danger they supposedly pose to “suffering Americans.”
Recent viral claims about Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets—cats, ducks, and geese—in Springfield, Ohio, have been seized upon and amplified by Vance and other Republican lawmakers in recent days.
The senator and Republican nominee for vice president tweeted on Monday that he’d previously raised the issue of “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield.” He added, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
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Vance wasn’t the only one to indulge in a little baseless fear-mongering on Monday. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) posted a meme of two cats holding each other under an impact font caption reading “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” Elon Musk tweeted “Ohio rn” over a screenshot of a Simpsons episode showing Bart and Lisa staring at a cat’s grave.
The conspiracy theory was also thrown around by the Trump campaign, which said in a news release that Haitian migrants had “reportedly been caught ‘decapitating ducks’ and hunting geese and other livestock in public parks—and even kidnapping residents’ pets—then eating them.”
Even the official X account of the House Judiciary GOP got in on the fun, posting an A.I.-generated image of former President Donald Trump cuddling a duck and a kitten in a river. “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!” it wrote.
A spokesperson for the city Springfield told CBS News that there had been “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused” by immigrants. The city’s police department told the Springfield-News Sun that it had received no reports related to pets being kidnapped and eaten.
The White House similarly pushed back on the “dangerous” claims.
“This kind of misinformation is dangerous,” national security spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. “Because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is. And they might act on that kind of misinformation and act on it in a way where somebody can get hurt so it needs to stop.”
But that didn’t stop Vance from digging his heels in. He defended himself against both criticism and reality in a lengthy X post, saying his office had received “many inquiries” over the past few weeks from Springfield residents saying that migrants had absconded with their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife.
“It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he admitted, before plunging onward.
“Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here,” he said, seemingly referring to a 2023 incident in which an 11-year-old boy was killed after a Haitian driver whose license was not valid in Ohio slammed into a school bus just outside of Springfield.
Vance went on to outline the strain that the recent influx of as many as 20,000 Haitians, according to city officials who spoke to The New York Times, has put on Springfield’s health and education services. (The city’s population was around 58,000 people as of the 2020 census.)
“In short, don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” Vance urged. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) was quick to call Vance out for his alarmism, tweeting, “You and your gerbil can come out from under your couch, JD. The pet-eating story isn’t real.”
It was also Swalwell, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who took his Republican colleagues to task for their A.I. meme, furiously calling Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) out in a Tuesday hearing.
“What the hell is this?” he asked, pointing to a blown-up printout of the image propped up on an easel. “The chairman tweets, ‘Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio’ because he goes down some crazy rabbit hole—completely debunked—that aliens are eating pets. My God, are you OK, Mr. Chairman?”
The bogus claims appear to have originated from a number of different sources. At least one Springfield resident has alleged at a recent city commission meeting that migrants were grabbing and killing ducks at a local park. Another claimed, in testimony picked up by the The Daily Mail, that she and her husband were being driven from their home because of screaming migrant “squatters” in their front yard.
Other reports about supposed pet-killing migrants have surfaced on social media, including in a local crime-waters group on Facebook, where a commenter attributed it to a neighbor’s daughter’s friend who’d found her lost cat hanging from a tree, according to the News-Sun.
There was also the separate incident last month in which an Ohio woman was arrested and charged with killing and eating a cat, as reported by Fox News. The woman, Allexis Telia Ferrell, does not appear to have a migrant background or any ties to the Haitian community, according to Mediaite.
