Two days before the debate, an email went out to all city employees warning them about the already viral narrative, and to let them know if they received any concerning correspondence. The response was immediate.
“We received a disturbing/threatening phone call. The call came in at 10:27 pm last nite. He left a message on our machine,” one city employee said in an email to city manager Bryan Heck.
An email from a police officer notes a phone call from a woman who claimed she let her cat out and then found “cat meat” outside her home. After her neighbor closed the blinds on her following an inquiry about the “meat,” the police say this “led her to believe they had something to do with it.” The woman later found her cat unharmed.
The city also received racist emails, referring to “Haitian invaders” (Trump and other Republicans have referred to migrant “invasions”), accusing Haitians of practicing voodoo with cats as a “significant part of their culture,” and offering unsolicited advice that Haitians “will not like the bitter cold” of winter.
“You have immigrants harassing your citizens, going into parks and taking and killing animals, taking people's pets, skinning and eating them in public places, flipping over cars, taking over citizens yards, etc. Why in the world have you not called in the National Guard?” one email asked.
People watch as Springfield Police Department officers investigate the Springfield City Hall after bomb threats were made against buildings earlier in the day in Springfield, Ohio on September 12, 2024.
Other emails called for a “Haitian hunting license” while another mused that instead of school shootings, shooters should “set their sights on these Haitian animals.”
The emails show the internal struggle the city faced in addition to the public reaction.
Bomb threats against Springfield schools and government facilities led to multiple closures and a festival celebrating the region’s diversity was canceled.
Adding insult to injury, reports have shown that Vance knew ahead of time that the stories were false, but he proceeded to push the narrative anyway.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do,” Vance told CNN in a September interview, defending his and Trump’s actions.
Vice President Kamala Harris said that promoting the lie should be disqualifying for someone like Trump, who is seeking the presidency.
“When you have these positions—when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning,” Harris told reporters during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in September.
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