Springfield is a divided American everytown — with a Haitian community vilified by the Trump administration. Will we protect our neighbors?

On the morning of Feb. 2, 2026, more than a thousand people packed into St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield, Ohio, for an event called “Here We Stand.”

At midnight the following day, Temporary Protected Status was set to expire for Haitian immigrants nationwide, including the estimated 15,000 who call this Rust Belt city of 60,000 home.

The mayor took to the stage to ask 300 audience members to exit so the event could continue within the building’s legal capacity. Young people seated throughout the room stood and offered their seats for elders standing along the room’s periphery.

After milling about the room chatting with friends from Springfield and nearby Columbus, where I live, I found an open seat along the main aisle next to my friend Clara, a white woman four decades my senior.

The two of us had spent hours together the previous summer at grocery stores in Springfield, seated behind a folding table and a banner with the name of the organization we represented, Springfield Neighbors United, in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.

Our group formed in the wake of the 2024 election after a series of meetings convened by local faith leaders. We knew then that the Trump administration was likely to strip immigration protections from Haitian refugees, and that our neighbors were preparing for the unthinkable: detention, deportation, families separated, kids left behind.

At the grocery stores, our table was stacked with power of attorney forms. These would be necessary if a parent was detained and decided they wanted a family member or trusted friend to take guardianship of their child. We also had business cards with contact information for Springfield Neighbors United and quarter sheets listing operating hours for the local St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity that offers many resources for community members. And there was an assortment of colorful, multilingual children’s books donated by Fran DeWine, Gov. Mike DeWine’s wife. Both were raised in nearby Yellow Springs.

The governor is a Republican, as is the mayor, and while they have often spoken in defense of the Haitian community, many do not share their feelings. Springfield is not a sanctuary city or liberal bastion. It is a majority-white industrial town in a red state, with a long history of racial segregation and disinvestment in its Black neighborhoods. Sixty-four percent of voters in this county supported Trump in 2024, and he won both prior elections as well. We’ve known throughout our organizing efforts that Springfield couldn’t be expected to present a united front against ICE.

The Haitian community expanded fast in Springfield over the past decade, after a car parts maker and then other companies moved in, looking for workers. Haitians were not welcomed with open arms. Though they contributed to an economic revitalization, resentment simmered. Angry locals filled public meetings to complain about the new residents and their impact on everything from traffic to inflated rental prices.

The vitriol only swelled after a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy, in 2023. When the boy’s family made public appeals for compassion, they were harassed and began receiving death threats. The Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group with a history of inciting ethnic and racial hatred, reportedly planned to demonstrate at the mayor’s house. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Ohioan JD Vance made Springfield’s Haitian community his frequent scapegoat. That August, ski-mask-wearing Blood Tribe members showed up at the city’s blues and jazz festival with guns and swastika flags. Trump’s grotesque debate-stage lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats were specifically about this small town.

In recent days, while the termination of Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status loomed, a flood of eerie AI-generated images hit many locals’ Facebook feeds. In one image, crowds of people donning red, white, and blue hold welcome banners and applaud ICE’s arrival. In another, cheery middle-aged white women hand ICE agents cups of hot cocoa.

And yet a resistance is growing.

In 2025, two new community organizations emerged in Springfield with missions dedicated to supporting the area’s immigrants and doing their best to ensure that their immigrant neighbors can continue to call the city home. In February 2025, Springfield Neighbors United became a collective of individuals guided by a nonpartisan “love your neighbor” ethos.

Months later, G92 launched as a coalition of churches committed to providing support for sanctuary efforts. (The name refers to the Hebrew word “ger,” meaning “immigrant” or “foreigner.” The coalition’s founders say that word appears 92 times in the Old Testament.) Public sanctuary is a strategic plan for hosting immigrant families who are at risk of deportation within churches or other religious institutions. It calls on Christians and other people with religious affiliations to act as faithful witnesses, rather than passive bystanders, to moral injustices.

Upon its creation, Springfield Neighbors United formed multiple teams. Our tabling effort was a project of the aiding team, tasked with pretty much everything that fell under providing neighborly assistance. At the grocery store, Clara and I talked to hundreds of Springfielders about free legal help, food pantries for those facing financial hardship, and acquiring passports for children with U.S. citizenship.

Our team was led by a retired couple who sometimes joined weekly organizational calls with their grandchildren giggling in the background. Like most participants in the organization, the couple are white; they are former Catholics brought to the cause by a moral compass that emphasizes the dignity of all people. I was moved to join organizing efforts by a similar impulse, but I wasn’t a longtime or even current resident of Springfield.

When I moved to nearby Columbus three years ago for work, I had a sense of being adrift in central Ohio. Although I was raised in the Rust Belt, I moved back after six years in California, where I had built a strong community with other progressives and people of color. In the small western Pennsylvanian city where I spent most of my childhood, I often felt pushed to the margins. At school, within my church, and sometimes even within my family, my Blackness kept me just beyond the reach of community. When I learned the area was home to a sizable population of Haitian immigrants, I felt the possibility of belonging.

I soon learned that in Springfield, a lot of longtime African American residents knew well that feeling of exclusion. When calls came from white-led churches to rally behind the city’s Haitian neighbors, Springfield’s Black Americans had to reflect on long-simmering tensions and decide how to move.

Adam Banks is a Black pastor at First Baptist Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side. “Neighborly love is at the core of this congregation’s identity,” he told me. His congregants have participated in packing meals and distributing them to immigrant neighbors, accompanied immigrants to court appointments, and helped neighbors complete powers of attorney.

But they’ve also sometimes bristled at the calls to action from the city’s white North Side, not recalling similar energy around police killings or the ongoing inequality south of the city’s color line.

Springfield has been portrayed in the national media as a white town overrun in recent years by Haitian arrivals. But like so many American places, it is not a white town but a town with two sides, white and black, richer and poorer. In this Midwestern city, the color line was drawn by quiet daily decisions about who was served, who was hired, and who received a bank loan. Those boundaries shaped the South Side, which Haitian refugees arrived to find had been excluded from economic prosperity and opportunity for generations.

Sixty years ago, racial segregation was enforced everywhere. Downtown, Black residents were made to sit in the balcony at the State Theater and the Regent Theatre, apart from their white neighbors below.

Black maids living on the South Side had to walk all the way to Yellow Springs just to cash their paychecks. “They would not cash them here,” Marceeta Jeffrey, a 72-year-old resident, told me, shaking her head.

There is also a legacy of Black leadership almost since Springfield’s founding in 1801. George and Sarah Gammon, free Black Springfielders, built their home in 1850 and opened it to enslaved people fleeing north toward Canada. Several of the Gammons’ neighbors were also active in facilitating the Underground Railroad. Robert C. Henry, who was born in Springfield in 1921, became the city’s mayor, and the first Black mayor in Ohio, in 1966.

Sharon, who lives not far from the Gammon house on the South Side, told her son, who is in his 40s and lives on the North Side, to keep away if ICE descends: “Stay on your own side of town. Keep your butt in the house when it gets dark because if they run your plates and they see that you have a concealed carry, they’re coming out with guns blazing.” (She did not want her last name used.) Being Black at a time when federal agents are actively detaining Black immigrants adds to the level of risk that Black people already face with law enforcement.

Haitian refugees to Springfield have settled mostly on the South Side, and many longtime African American residents welcomed their new neighbors. Marceeta Jeffrey raised two children in Springfield and owns a beauty salon on South Yellow Springs Street. She points to all the homes on her block occupied by Haitian families.

“The Haitians came in and started building up the yards, getting them beautiful again,” she said. “I get to see the kids play and run after the ice cream trucks now. And sit on the porch and get their hair combed.”

But she has noticed that her neighbors haven’t been outside as much over the past six months.

“The women come out to the car and help load everything, but the women don’t really venture out like they were before,” she said. “They used to gather on one corner and walk up to church on Sunday. To see them all dressed up, all pretty on the corners every Sunday, was a beautiful thing. You don’t see that anymore.”

When I asked Viles Dorsainvil, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center, what made Springfield a good destination for him and other Haitians, he told me he liked the serenity of the rural area. Haitians did not leave their country voluntarily so much as they were pushed from it by gang violence and political collapse created in part by more than a century of U.S. meddling. Many people in the U.S., whose perspectives were shaped by decades of media coverage narrowly focused on Port-au-Prince’s crowded slums, imagine Haitians as a people used to density, the cacophony of urban life. But many of these immigrants come not from the city but from Haiti’s sprawling rural interior, from land and community and from a way of life that Springfield might allow them to rebuild.

The Haitian community has put down roots on the South Side, with stores, restaurants, and nonprofits. But its members also worry about their young people growing up in sometimes inhospitable environments.

Philomene Philistin, a naturalized citizen from Haiti and single mother of three children, owns a small Haitian grocery store on the South Side and since 2010 has operated a nonprofit that promotes creative expression for young people. This year, she is eager to bring a talent show to Springfield.

“They’re not understood,” she says of Haitian youth here. “They don’t have the freedom to just go out and do things and learn about themselves.”

Gina Vincent, a teacher who moved from Haiti in the 1990s and settled in Springfield in 2021, was disturbed when she visited a local school and the Haitian students flocked to her.

“They didn’t know what the teacher was saying at all,” she said. The experience left her frustrated and deeply concerned about the education that Haitian children are receiving.

“These kids are getting left behind, and it’s going to affect their future,” she said. “The Haitian children were being crushed in there.”

ICE has carried out targeted pickups in and around Springfield since the beginning of the year, but the expected full-scale invasion that so many are bracing for has yet to happen. The day of our massive church event, a judge blocked the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status.

Though the community was not suddenly deportable, many people with TPS were notified that their driver’s licenses expired on Feb. 3. So far, lawyers have been unable to figure out a way to get them renewed. To avoid the criminal charge associated with driving without a license that would expedite their removal, many Haitians cannot drive themselves and their children to work and school.

In the weeks following the ruling, exhausted organizers found themselves fighting a new battle on an unexpected front. Out of nowhere, a TikTok influencer saw the power of attorney forms circulating through Springfield’s churches and community organizations and blasted out the idea that they were evidence of something sinister. He claimed that local organizers, in anticipation of Haitian children possibly being separated from their parents, were interested only in placing Black children in foster care.

The videos also cast suspicion on a flier asking outside protesters not to come to Springfield until local organizations called on them and to complete rapid-response training before doing so. To anyone familiar with organizing, this is not a red flag. It is standard practice. Outside organizers follow the lead of local communities. That principle breaks down only when outside organizers decide they know better than the people they have come to help.

What makes these conspiracies hard to condemn outright is that most of the TikTokers spreading them are Black, and they are drawing on real histories. They invoke the legacy of enslavement, Native American boarding schools, racist child-welfare practices, and the forced sterilization of Black and brown women. They point to the untrustworthiness of white church leaders at a moment of rising Christian nationalism and to an Ohio state government that has largely submitted to Trump’s agenda. These are not paranoid references; they are grounded in documented harm.

But the framework breaks down in its application. It doesn’t account for the deep religiosity of a Caribbean people who know colonial exploitation intimately, who have their own reasons for wariness, and who have nonetheless arrived at a relationship to faith institutions shaped by their own particular history of resistance and survival. It ignores that powers of attorney have long been used by Hispanic immigrant communities with far more experience navigating ICE encounters, and that organizers throughout Springfield primarily recommend biological family members as temporary guardians. Most important, it misses what is actually happening on the ground: quiet, unglamorous, camera-shy work of neighbors supporting neighbors, shared equally across racial lines, largely invisible to the national media (and apparently to TikTok).

The spread of these conspiracies does substantial damage. In casting doubt on Springfield’s preparation, these unfounded accusations cast a skeptical eye on the capacity of small cities and rural communities to show up for their neighbors.

ICE is coming not only for Chicago and Los Angeles. It is also coming for places like Springfield — semirural, majority white, without the infrastructure of a sanctuary city or the political muscle of a Democratic governor. If we cannot believe that communities like this one are capable of organizing, of showing solidarity, of protecting their neighbors, then we have already conceded the places where the fight is hardest and the need is greatest. There are only so many Los Angeleses. There are a lot of Springfields, and they cannot afford our doubt.

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