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Trump Is Waging War on Haitians

In Springfield, Ohio, ICE agents are targeting a community that Trump has been villainizing since 2024.

The “Greetings from Springfield” mural painted by Victor Ving and Lisa Beggs is seen in downtown Springfield, Ohio, on February 5, 2026. A US judge has blocked the Trump administration’s decision to strip some 350,000 Haitian immigrants of deportation protections set to expire on February 3, 2026.

Late last week, volunteers working with the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, were inundated with calls about men being arrested and separated from their families. One of those detained was a pastor, Gilbert Joubert Adrien. Joubert Adrien, who is the minister of a church of 130 people, was, apparently, snatched by ICE agents while at a gas station. He is just one of several dozen Haitians to be targeted by ICE in Springfield in the past week, according to monitoring groups such as G92 and the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Haitians in Springfield have been the center of some of the cruelest xenophobic behaviors of the Trump era. Perhaps you will remember the 2024 presidential campaign, during which JD Vance and Donald Trump made up false rumors about Haitians in the city “eating dogs and cats.” Trump doubled down on this outlandish claim during his televised debate with Kamala Harris; Vance admitted that the allegations were likely false but nevertheless went out of his way to justify his circulation of these slanderous allegations.

Now the administration is unleashing the full force of ICE on this same community, launching what can only be described as an officially sanctioned pogrom against people whose offense seems mainly to be that they are members of a race and a nation that Trump regards with peculiar contempt and animus. “These are people who fled for their lives,” Guerline Jozef, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told me. “Some of them still have pending asylum claims, which means the government is violating due process.”

Similar attacks against Haitians are occurring around the country. In San Diego, advocates for the Haitian community have been using social media to report dozens of ICE kidnappings over the past two weeks along El Cajon Boulevard, and in the City Heights and Lemon Grove neighborhoods. In Flatbush, Brooklyn, the epicenter of the Big Apple’s Haitian........

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