Trump Doubles Down on False Claims About Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets

Donald Trump is not backing off from his baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, are eating family pets. The former president, in fact, doubled down last night during a town hall event for Univision held in Miami.

Trump made the claim during the ABC News presidential debate last month, despite being fact-checked by co-moderator David Muir that Springfield's city manager said that there was no evidence that immigrants were eating people's pets. J.D. Vance repeated the lie, acknowledging on X that the conspiracy theory is a "rumor" while encouraging followers to keep spreading it anyway.

During the Univision event, a Latino Republican voter from Arizona said, speaking in Spanish, "The authorities in Springfield, OH, have more than one time clarified that the Haitians are not eating their cats and their dogs. Nonetheless, you want to revoke the permit they have to legally reside in this country. My question to you, respectfully, is: Do you really believe that these people are eating people's pets?"

Trump replied, "This was just reported. I was just saying what has been reported. And eating other things too that they are not supposed to be. All I do is report. I was there, and I am going to be there, and we are going to take a look. And I will give you a full report when I do. But that's been in the newspapers and reported pretty broadly."

He added, "I will say this as far as Springfield is concerned, because I do know that situation, you have a city of 52,000 people and they've added almost 30,000 migrants into the city. If you were a person that lived there, if you lived in Springfield, OH, and all of sudden you couldn't get into a hospital, you couldn't get your children into a school, you wouldn't be able to buy groceries... If any of that happened, it would be a disaster for you and you wouldn't be happy. We want to make our people safe and secure and we want to make them happy."

Elsewhere during the town hall, Trump was questioned about inflation, the border, and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Republican candidate was asked by a farmer, "If you deport these people, who would do that job, and what price would we pay for food?"

"We have to have a lot of people come into our country," Trump said. "We just want them to come in legally through our system." He then claimed that the Biden administration was releasing "hundreds of thousands of people who were murderers, drug dealers, terrorists."

Speaking about the Jan. 6 attack, Trump said that "hundreds of thousands of people" came to Washington, but it wasn't related to him. "They didn't come because of me," he claimed. "They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election. That's why they came."

He added, "I said 'peacefully and patriotically.' Nothing done wrong at all. That was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions."

Earlier this month, during an interview with Newsmax , Trump claimed that the Haitian migrants in Springfield — who have been given temporary protected status and are in the U.S. legally — are "illegal immigrants as far as I'm concerned."

"I mean, look at Springfield, where 30,000 illegal immigrants are dropped, and it was, they may have done it through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I'm concerned," Trump said. "They're destroying the town, they're destroying the whole — they'll end up destroying the state. We cannot let this happen."

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has called Trump's lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield " garbage ," and he added, "This is a piece of garbage that was simply not true. There's no evidence of this at all."

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