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How residents of Springfield, Ohio react to Trump’s election

Vaseline2 weeks ago

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How residents of Springfield, Ohio react to Trump’s election

It wasn’t long ago that Springfield, Ohio, an industrial city about 45 miles west of Columbus, made national political headlines.

In September, President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican, and his running mate, Vice President-elect JD Vance, spread baseless rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating cats and dogs.

The furor peaked during Trump’s only debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

“They eat the dogs in Springfield,” Trump said. “The people who came in ate the cats. They ate – they ate the pets of the people who live there.”

Local officials quickly refuted the rumors, but that did not stop the country’s political attention from focusing on the city of about 58,000 residents, including about 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants. Local schools, government buildings and businesses received dozens of bomb threats.

Trump later mused that he planned to deport the city’s migrants to Venezuela.

Springfield’s Haitian residents are in the country legally as beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status, a Department of Homeland Security program that allows people from unsafe countries to live and work in the US. During the campaign, Trump said he would revoke this status.

In the aftermath of the November 5 presidential election, in which Donald Trump decisively won the Electoral College to return to the White House for a second term, residents of the city and area reacted with a range of emotions: fear, happiness , indifference. , and anger.

‘We’ll see what happens’

Pastor Andrew Mobley, 65, who helps run the Family Needs Inc. food bank. just south of downtown Springfield, said some of his Haitian immigrant clients had already called him the morning after the election asking what would happen.

Haitian immigrants are his food bank’s main clientele, making up about 50% of everyone who walks through the door. He told those who called him that it was too early to tell what would happen, to wait and see.

‘We’ll see what happens. I mean, you have to revoke temporary protection status, and if you revoke it, are you sending everyone back? Who pays for all that? They came here. I don’t think they will come back. So that will be difficult,” he said.

Mobley, a native Chicagoan, first made his way to Springfield in 2005 to be with his son. He still misses Chicago, but Springfield has been his home for 19 years. If the Trump administration deports the city’s immigrant population, the entire landscape would change, he said.

His first reaction to Trump’s victory: “It’s going to be what it’s going to be.”

“I’ve been through enough elections to say it is what it is, and let’s move on. Our mission here is to help those who need it. So I can’t get involved in any political part of it. We need to get involved in helping people through whatever they are going through,” he said.

‘We have no choice’

Rolmy Benjamin visited a supermarket in Springfield with his neighbors on Wednesday afternoon. He’s not a Springfield native — he lives in Dayton, just 25 miles away — but he does have something in common with many of its residents: He’s an immigrant from Haiti.

He was not concerned about Tuesday’s election results and said Trump would “do his job.”

“We have no choice because Trump is our president. If (he asks) us to return (to Haiti), we have no choice. We will be back,” he said.

Bejamain has a wife and three sons in Haiti.

“It’s like Ohio State winning the national championship.”

The negative attention to Springfield did not change the situation for either side. Trump carried Clark County with 39,636 votes or 64.2% of the total votes. Harris had 21,494 votes or 34.8% of the total votes.

By comparison, Trump won Clark County in 2020 by a similar vote margin, 39,032, or 60.8% of the total vote. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, received 24,076 votes, or 37.5% of the total vote, according to Politico’s 2020 election data.

Independent voter Gay Harris, 72, stepped out of a parking garage in downtown Springfield on Wednesday wearing a red jacket and multiple red, white and blue jewelry. Harris, who was having lunch with her retired teacher friends — she was president of a local teachers association — said she was “very happy” that Trump had won.

“It’s like Ohio State winning the national championship. It’s just so exciting. I mean, it’s just amazing. I’m just looking forward to it,” she said.

Her support for Trump has remained steady over the years; she voted for him in every general election he ran in, but she did vote against him once in the primary, she said.

In the meantime, she has drifted away from the Democratic Party.

“They are not the Democratic Party I knew. “I would vote for whoever I thought did the best job,” she said. “But that’s changed in the last 15 years, and I just don’t like the liberal policies they’re pushing for.”

‘I was rejected’

Springfield resident Cindy Redman, 62, started her day Wednesday sitting with her cats and watching TV. When she saw that Trump had won the presidency, she was “really disappointed.”

“I screamed, I swore,” she said. “My cats look at me like, ‘Oh, my goodness. Mom’s really mad.’ But no, because I didn’t want him in office.”

Redman has not been able to vote since the 1980s because of a non-violent conviction, but she said she would have supported Kamala Harris for president. She is concerned that the future Trump administration will eliminate Social Security and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps.

Without them, she fears she will end up on the street.

She is also old enough to remember when Roe v. Wade first went into effect in 1973. The right to abortion saved her life, she said.

“Now that’s all going to go away, and that’s not right. Why don’t we women have the right to say what we want to happen to our own bodies?” she said. “Why does it have to be a man to say it?”[email protected]

@NathanRHart

Vaseline2 weeks ago

0 4 minutes read