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Former President Donald Trump created a stir when he made the baseless claim in a Sept. 10 presidential debate that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the pets” of their new neighbors — repeating a rumor that his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, circulated on social media one day earlier.
Now, Vance has cherry-picked data to make the unfounded claim that immigrants are responsible for an 81% increase in the city’s murders.
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Vance was asked about his Sept. 9 post on X that immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield. Vance deflected the question by talking about the “terrible problems caused by [Vice President] Kamala Harris’ open border in Springfield.”
“Thanks to her open border, murders are up 81% in Springfield, Ohio,” Vance claimed in the Sept. 15 interview.
The Springfield Police Division provided us crime data for the last 10 years, dating to 2014, that show there were nine murders in 2023. That’s a 50% increase from the six murders in 2022, and an 80% increase from 2021 — but one fewer than the 10 murders in 2020, when Trump was president. The number of murders in 2023 was equal to or lower than the number of murders in three of the four years that Trump was president, despite the apparent increase in the city’s population. (See the chart below.)
As for the number of murders in 2024, a city police official told us that there have been four to date — which puts the city on track for fewer murders than last year, and about the same as 2022. (We found news accounts of three reported murders in the city. The police official said the fourth was a shooting over this past weekend that resulted in one death.)
We also could find no evidence to support Vance’s claim that immigrants are responsible for committing murders. The city does not keep track of the ethnicity of those accused of committing crimes other than the two broad categories of Hispanic and non-Hispanic, a police official told us. None of the news reports about the murders committed in 2024 mentions the ethnicity of the suspected murderer.
In an FAQ on the city’s immigrant population, the city addressed concerns about Haitians being responsible for more crime. “Haitians are more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators in our community. Clark County jail data shows there are 199 inmates in our county jail this week. Two of them are Haitian. That’s 1% (as of Sept. 8),” the city website says.
We asked the Trump campaign about Vance’s claim, but we did not get a response.
Haitian Population in Springfield
Springfield has become a focal point in the national debate over immigration because large numbers of Haitians who were granted legal status in the United States have settled in the city over the last several years.
In his CBS News interview and at a Sept. 18 rally in North Carolina, Vance said that there are 20,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield. In a Sept. 18 rally in Long Island, Trump boosted the figure, saying that there was “no crime” in the city before claiming that “32,000 illegal immigrants” came into town “in a period of a few weeks.” But Mayor Rob Rue put the city’s total immigrant population at between 12,000 and 15,000, which is also on the city’s FAQ page.
“We have realistically been saying 12 to 15,000 immigrants is what we’ve, what we have counted through the health department and other agencies that we work with,” Rue said in a Sept. 10 press conference.
The Census Bureau estimates the city’s total population at 58,662 people, as of 2020.
The influx of immigrants helped solve a labor shortage, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, but also has strained the city’s services. Earlier this month, Gov. Mike DeWine announced that the state would provide state troopers to help with traffic control and enforcement in Springfield and $2.5 million to help the city expand primary health care for its residents.
The help with traffic enforcement came a little more than a year after an 11-year-old boy died in an accident last August when a Haitian driver hit a school bus. The driver, Hermanio Joseph, was sentenced to nine to 13 years in prison on charges of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide.
The boy’s death had become a talking point for Trump and Vance in their campaign against Harris.
In a Sept. 9 social media post, the Trump campaign said, “REMEMBER: 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed on his way to school by a Haitian migrant that Kamala Harris let into the country in Springfield, Ohio.” A day later, Vance posted on X that the boy had been “murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”
At a city commissioners’ meeting on Sept. 10, the boy’s father appealed to Vance and others to stop using his son’s name as a “political tool.” That same night, Trump said during the presidential debate: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” A day earlier, Vance had posted on X: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
But, as we wrote, Springfield police said in a statement that “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” Rue also told CNN that there were “no verifiable” reports of such activity.
Likewise, Vance’s claim that “murders are up 81% in Springfield” because of immigrants is unsupported by the facts.
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