Charleroi was adapting to an influx of migrants. Then Donald Trump weighed in

Kevin Kuzma was in the middle of filling t-shirt orders at his screen printing shop in Charleroi when a new customer walked in.

Kuzma couldn't figure out what the customer, a Haitian migrant, wanted to order because he spoke little English. So the customer called a friend whose English was a little bit better. "He wants to put his name in a ?" Kuzma said loudly into the phone. "A ?"

Kuzma and the customer, whose name was Avion, worked together to find a suitable image of a crown. Then Avion gestured with his fingers on the computer screen to tell Kuzma to make the picture bigger. Kuzma told Avion that his customized sweatshirt wouldn't be ready until the next day, which disappointed Avion.

"If I have nothing to do, if I was sitting here doing nothing, that's not a problem, I can do it today," Kuzma said. "Right now I have my hands full with about three or four things that I have to get done today."

Business has been increasing at Mon City Apparel, Kuzma said, in part because of new Haitian customers, like Avion. Most of them don't have cars, he said, so they walk to his store. "They seem to celebrate birthdays on a high level," Kuzma said. "So a lot of times they'll come in for birthday shirts."

Weekends in downtown Charleroi are bustling with people now, Kuzma said, unlike anything he's seen in the 15 years since he moved to Charleroi from New Jersey. Within two blocks, five new businesses have opened up that are run by or cater to Haitians. Kuzma said they have spruced up a downtown that was blighted with empty storefronts.

"They're welcome customers to me," he said. "I don't have an issue with them."

But Kuzma has heard some long-time residents complain about the immigrants — without saying anything specific about what problems they're causing. Many of those same residents, he added, used to complain about the town's slow demise. Charleroi's population has declined every decade since 1920, from a peak of more than 11,500 to a little over 4,000 in 2020.

Then the Haitians started arriving.

The Trump effect

It's not entirely clear when that trend began, though locals say they began noticing a spike in the population between three and five years ago. Nor is it certain how many Haitians live in Charleroi today.

But some local leaders estimate that the new migrants — most of whom are Haitian — have increased the population of Charleroi from around 4,000 to more than 6,000. There aren't any hard numbers, according to the borough manager, Joe Manning. But Greg Dourfler, the mayor, estimates that immigration has increased the population by more than 50% in the last several years. That would work out to a roughly 1,500% increase in immigrants since the 2020 census, which counted fewer than 200 foreign-born residents living in town.

Manning said that until recently, any discontent expressed by local residents has largely been confined to social media. For example, Facebook commenters chimed in on a recent local news story about a local businessman who paid for seven Haitian high-school students to attend their first prom. Some commenters celebrated the news, but a few asked why native-born Charleroi students weren't receiving free tickets

The online bitterness didn't seem to affect the town, Manning said: "Nobody showed up at borough council meetings to complain or to bring anything to our attention."

Then, last week President Trump weighed in. "The small 4,000-person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania — have you heard of it?" Trump said during a press conference in Arizona. "What a beautiful name, but it's not so beautiful now. It has experienced a 2,000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. So, Pennsylvania, remember this when you have to go to vote."

Trump added that Charleroi's "schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don't speak not a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars."

In fact, leaders of the Charleroi School District say they are receiving state help to cover additional expenses. The district's roughly 225 English language students this year will eventually bring the district an additional $2 million per year from the state's funding formula — an amount that covers the additional staff administrators have had to hire.

And some local leaders like Manning are worried that Charleroi could be turned into the next Springfield, Ohio. Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, recently had to call in state troopers to try to help quell the uproar in Springfield after Trump falsely accused local Haitians of eating cats and dogs .

Several Charleroi leaders and civic organizations have criticized Trump for his remarks. Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, the president of the Charleroi Borough Council, said Trump was exploiting the town for political gain. Just days before Trump's remarks, Charleroi's leaders learned that a glass factory known for making Pyrex dishware would close and move to Ohio. More than 300 jobs were in jeopardy after more than 100 years of production in town — the latest crushing blow to the local economy.

"Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community, judging the entire group based on misinformation and fear of outsiders," Hopkins-Calcek said in her statement.

Sean Logue, the chair of the Washington County Republican Party, said Republicans aren't attacking the Haitian people. "They have a reputation for being churchgoing and for making the most out of their opportunity," Logue said. "So we're not demonizing them."

Instead, he said, Democratic leaders are to blame for allowing the immigration without providing the town with support.

"[Trump] did not say that the Haitians are the ones responsible for it not being beautiful," Logue said. "What he's saying is that it's a small town and has problems. And a few thousand Haitians showed up and the town's being forced to pay for them."

State and local Republicans have piled on. Republican Senate Candidate Dave McCormick said in a statement, "Roads are dangerous, schools are overwhelmed and police are struggling to keep up with the surge."

In fact, even local Republicans acknowledge that there has been no surge in crime. "The police chief told us when I was a solicitor of the borough last year, that crime has not gone up, or at least the Haitians are not committing crimes to an elevated extent compared to the native population," Logue said.

And one local Republican, state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, has stood out among local Republicans for her willingness to defend the Haitians. Bartolotta declined an interview request because she said she was out of the country. But she defended Charleroi's Haitian community on X and Facebook .

"For some of these people saying awful things about these Haitian immigrants, I'd ask them what it might've been like for their parents or grandparents or great grandparents who might have come from another country and spoken a different language," she wrote on Facebook. "How about the Italian immigrants and how they were treated when they first came over? Or the Polish? Or the Irish?"

'Cluttering up things that used to not be so cluttered'

Most of the accusations about the town aren't based in reality, Manning said.

For example the data doesn't bear out rumors of a rise in traffic accidents. The borough is in the middle of a $6 million project to improve its major intersections, and during the preparation for that project, Manning said he looked at the regional police data and it showed traffic accidents had continued falling.

"We saw them coming down for the past two or three years," he said. "They've been decreasing."

The Haitian immigrants aren't causing financial problems in the school district either, according to Ed Zelich, the superintendent of the Charleroi Area School District. Zelich said a number of teachers in the district told him they are upset that their students are being scapegoated.

In Ohio, "Springfield schools have been closed down. There have been bomb threats," Zelich said. "We want nothing to do with that. We want to educate children."

Even if the complaints by politicians so far have lacked evidence or been incorrect or misleading, that doesn't mean the town had totally accepted the Haitians before Trump spoke.

Jason Jackson, 42, doesn't like that he can't communicate with the Haitians. He wonders if the recent sewage smell in town is related to their arrival (it has to do with a sewage cleaning issue, according to Manning.) And he asked if the Haitians brought the ubiquitous spotted lanternflies to town (again, no).

Jackson does pressure washing for a living and can't find anyone to help him but said he wouldn't consider hiring any Haitians because of the language barrier. They make him feel uncomfortable, he said. "There's so many pouring in that ... it's just cluttering up things that used to not be so cluttered."

Jackson, who is Black and from North Charleroi, said some of his customers have spoken in a way that made him think they don't like Haitians because of their race. "They're used to the only black people in this town being from North Charleroi," he said. "And now there's black people everywhere. I'm sure it's burning them up."

Eva Ross was at a social services agency in Charleroi on Monday trying to get a new low-income apartment in a neighboring town. She's lived in Charleroi for 20 years, she said, but in the last few, her neighborhood's demographics have changed. "My whole neighborhood was white and now it's all Haitian," she said.

"I'm not racist," she said. "But I came down Fallowfield [Street] a couple of months ago. There it was like on a Saturday or Sunday evening, real nice out. Everybody was on the streets walking. I probably counted 40 people walking from one end of Fallowfield to this end of Fallowfield. Not one white person."

She doesn't like how long it takes to buy something at the Dollar General near her house now because, she said, Haitians struggle to communicate at the register.

'I feel like Charleroi became better'

Pierre Richard Momplaisir moved to Charleroi from Haiti four years ago because he heard from a friend that he could get a job at Fourth Street Foods, a food packaging facility in town where many Haitians work. Momplaisir works as a forklift driver at the factory to support his wife and two children.

Fourth Street Foods didn't respond to requests for comment.

Momplaisir works the late shift because he's also been hired by the school district to help translate for migrant families registering their children. He speaks four languages, including Haitian-Creole and Spanish. Momplaisir said that families will call him at all hours to ask for translation help. And he, in turn, tries to counsel them to not crowd too tightly in the houses they are renting — and to learn English.

"The language is like a weapon just to defend yourself," he said he tells them. "If you want to get a better position, good work or better work, then you need to speak English."

Momplaisir has noticed that some Americans are a little wary of Haitians. "Some of the American people really think that yeah, they come to do bad things," he said. "But for the Haitian people, they are not like that. They are focused on work."

Caleb Fontus moved to Charleroi just before the town saw a surge of Haitian residents in 2019. He owns a party space downtown that largely caters to native-born customers. But he said he's been able to rent out some homes in town to Haitian migrants. And he said they've been better tenants than his native-born renters.

"They pay on time. They don't want any trouble with the law. They don't want any issues," he said. "But I have had other tenants where they know the law, like the natives — they know the law and they use the loopholes to not pay your rent and to destroy your house."

Fontus pointed to a number of businesses on his block that have been thriving in storefronts that had been closed for years. They include a Western Union, a convenience store, a place that sells hair products and a clothing store. Fontus said he wanted to buy a car wash in town but the owner of the car wash is doing such good business now that he won't sell it anymore.

"All the [businesses] that have catered to the immigrants, all those are thriving," he said. "All the ones that are not catering and that are staying segregated, they're not making as much as money."

Asian Reid, a cashier at Subway, said she has been able to buy better hair products at one of the new Haitian-owned stores in town. Reid moved to neighboring Monessen a few years ago, she said, because of problems in Charleroi. But now she said she would move back.

"They're hard workers," she said of the Haitians. "I feel like once they brought them over here and they opened all these businesses, I feel like Charleroi became better."

Marie Guerdy works as a cashier in the new grocery store in town, which sells a variety of brands and produce that are widely accessible in Haiti. Guerdy was a Kindergarten teacher in Haiti but moved with her family first to Mexico and then the United States when it became unsafe. Guerdy, who speaks Haitian-Creole, French and Spanish, rolled her eyes at Trump's comments

"He said whatever he wanted to say," she told WESA in Spanish. "But we don't eat what he said we eat. I eat beef, goat, fish, yes. But dogs never. It is very disgusting for us to eat dogs and cats."

William Staten was in Charleroi on Wednesday to tend to his wife's house. The couple moved to Erie in 2019, in part because many of their relatives and friends in town had passed away. But he was in town to tend to the grass and weeds at their empty house, so they wouldn't get a fine. A local resident had offered to cut their grass for $75 but Staten thought that was too much. During his visit this week he heard about a Haitian who would cut the grass for $25.

Staten was trying to track down another Haitian who was interested in buying the house. Staten said he and his wife recently lost their jobs as truck drivers and are in poor health, so they need the money.

"The solution for my problem is the Haitian," he said.

Staten, who is Black, agrees with Trump on most issues, including immigration. But not about the Haitians in Charleroi.

"You can't look at a person's skin color and say, 'Well, they're responsible for destroying Charleroi' because that's not the case," he said. "That's where Trump and I have a problem. I think that Trump could do a lot better than the Democrats are doing. That's for sure. But you can't racially profile people even if they are immigrants."

'My biggest challenge: getting the misinformation cleared up'

The Charleroi Area School District takes in students from several local areas–not just Charleroi. So the impact of immigrants in the schools hasn't been as pronounced as in the borough. The roughly 225 students who are still learning English make up less than 15% of the district population, according to data provided by the district. More than a third of those students are enrolled in Kindergarten and 1st grade.

That's been a challenge, said Elaine Ondrish, a Kindergarten teacher in her 19th year of teaching. But the schools and teachers have learned to adapt over the last few years and now many of the students she had a few years ago are now writing whole paragraphs in English.

"When they're in kindergarten, it is the easiest, I would like to say compared to the other grades, because everybody has to learn what a 5 is," she said.

Ondrish said every student is receiving just as much attention as they did five years ago. "It makes me mad that so many outsiders think that this is ... such a burden," she said. "For people to say that their local kids aren't getting the attention, that's not true. We're giving all the kids all the attention, regardless of what language you speak or where you're from."

The district had to hire an extra kindergarten teacher this year to keep up with booming enrollment. In other grades most of the Haitian students join existing classes, and state money allows the district to bring in additional support for them.

The school system employed only one ESL teacher five years ago, but now has four. It received a state grant last year to train another 11 teachers in ESL. The district hired a part-time translator, and uses an online application that streams a live translator during important meetings with parents.

Through its Migrant Education Program, the state already provides supplemental funding to train teachers and provide additional academic support after school and over the summer.

Resources aren't the district's biggest challenge, Zelich said: "Misinformation — that's my biggest challenge: getting the misinformation cleared up."

The attention the community has received since Trump spoke about it hasn't made that easier.

A group of four men who identified themselves to WESA as working for a nonprofit called America 2100 that is funded by Republican donors, began interviewing Charleroi residents and posting videos on social media. In a Twitter video that was retweeted by the platform's owner, Elon Musk, they falsely asserted that a majority of the district's young students are Haitian. (Enrollment data shows that even in kindergarten, which has the highest percentage of students who speak a second language, most students' first language is English.)

Another video quoted a local resident who described a real incident on a district bus: Last year a 19-year-old Haitian boy grabbed another student by the arm and pulled her out of her seat.

Zelich, the superintendent, said the incident drew much more local attention than the occasional high school fights that aren't related to migrants.

Trust me, that was blown so out of proportion. Two months of my life were miserable," he said. "And the child that did that was disciplined and the child that did that is no longer in the school."

The school district has raised property taxes in recent years. But it said its largest increase , in 2022, was in response to spiking inflation and uncertainty over state educational funding.

Some teachers would like additional resources to help the Haitian students. Paula Coles teaches a 5th grade class where 4 out of the 21 students are not yet proficient in English. Coles herself has two children with special needs, so she recognizes that it's her job to help students with whatever challenges they're facing. But she thinks more resources would help.

"It's not challenging for me because this is easy," she said. "It's challenging for them. So resource-wise, it would be nice to have that to make this transition to our country and our town easier. And I would like to advocate for that in any way."

Donna Bialom, one of the district's new ESL teachers, said she didn't agree with Trump that the Haitian are making Charleroi less beautiful. Some older students have taken on leadership roles to help make newer students more comfortable.

"They take it upon themselves to help the new students," she said. "And you see them walking down the hall together, showing them where to go. That's beautiful. It's not less beautiful. It's more beautiful."