After Donald Trump was all but laughed off the stage Tuesday night for suggesting illegal aliens are eating pets in the Ohio city, Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost accused the media of ignoring first-hand accounts from citizens in Springfield.
“There’s a recorded police call from a witness who saw immigrants capturing geese for food in Springfield,” Yost stated in post on X. “Citizens testified to City Council.”
That police call, which was made August 26, was recorded when a Springfield man said he was watching four Haitians at a city park – two men and two women – each of them holding a goose, The New York Post reported.
At an August 28 city council meeting, two days after the 911 call, a Springfield resident named Anthony Harris (pictured below) mentioned Haitians “grabbing up ducks” at the park in a long list of complaints. The Haitian immigrants, he said, can’t legally drive but are causing automobile accidents and even driving into buildings.
Those eyewitness accounts are good enough to be called as a witness in court, Yost said in his X post, but the media is choosing to believe a “carefully worded” press release from the City of Springfield.
Springfield Mayor Rob Rue has said there are no “credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed,” though park geese would not qualify as pets.
During the debate, co-moderator David Muir cited a denial by Springfield’s city manager to insist the former president was making a crazy, unsubstantiated claim.
In a blow to all the cat-eating claims, social media sites that posted video of a Haitian woman being arrested after eating a cat were proven wrong. The woman, identified as Allexis Ferrell, is not a native of Haiti and the gruesome incident did not happen in Springfield.
Tom Zawistowski, an Ohio-based conservative activist, tells AFN the Haitian controversy in Springfield is shining a light on the Biden administration’s liberal immigration policy.
“This is a community of 60,000 people,” he says. “You just add 20,000 Haitians who don't speak English, who don't have any acclimation to our form of government or way of life. And you just dump them there and you give them $1,500 a month and then that's it."
Diana Daniels, a Springfield resident, made a similar comment to Fox News after the Tuesday debate.
"If it took something like this to get the spotlight flashed on us, then so be it,” she said. “We've needed help for several years, and maybe we're going to finally get it.”
The number of Haitians currently living in Springfield is in dispute. The population is as little as 10,000 according to some media sources or as many as 20,000 now living in the city.
How such a huge number of Haitians ended up in Springfield is another debate, too. While many assume the federal government dumped them there, which is happening all over the nation, some news outlets say the Haitians came to Springfield by word-of-mouth after hearing of job opportunities.
Conservative activist Gary Bauer tells AFN what is happing in Springfield is a "national scandal" that is the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.
"What is happening in Springfield is yet another example of the failed policies, the anti-American policies, the America-last policies," Bauer complains, "that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have pursued during these four years."
Zawistowski says is encouraged that Attorney General Yost has directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending any more Haitians to the city.
Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, has also promised to help Springfield. He has pledged $2.5 million over the next two years for the county’s overburdened health department.
Citing the number of “inexperienced Haitian drivers,” the Governor said he is also sending state troopers to enforce traffic laws in the city.
