Fact-checking Sen. JD Vance’s heated Sept. 15 CNN interview

In the days since President Donald Trump repeated a baseless rumor about Springfield, Ohio, pets during a Sept. 10 debate viewed by 67 million people, the city’s authorities have responded to multiple threats of violence. They evacuated city hall, several K-12 schools and a state motor vehicle agency and canceled activities at two Springfield college campuses.

On Sept. 15, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — Trump’s running mate and the first of the Republican presidential ticket candidates to elevate false claims that Haitians in Springfield were eating pets — defended his team’s statements that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance told Dana Bash, host of CNN’s “State of the Union.” “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.”

Bash read a statement from Springfield’s Republican Mayor Rob Rue, who on Sept. 12 told a local news reporter the threats that had come in were anti-Haitian. He reiterated that pets in Springfield are safe and the claims they were being eaten are “false.”

“All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” Rue said. 

Bash asked Vance several times why he was spreading the claim, given local leaders’ concerns and whether he stood by them.

“Dana, the evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened,” Vance responded toward the end of the 17-minute interview.

When we reached out to Vance’s team with our questions, a spokesperson pointed to a Sept. 15 X post Vance made after the interview in which he re-shared a clip of Bash questioning his statement that he has to “create stories.”

“I didn’t invent constituents complaining about this,” Vance wrote. “We did help create the media focus on their complaints.”

Springfield, which had a 2020 population of 58,000, has received 12,000 to 15,000 migrants in recent years, not all of them Haitian, according to city officials. Many of these migrants were fleeing years of political unrest and seeking jobs in the city’s growing labor market. Local officials report the population shift has strained schools, housing and health care, led to cultural divisions and, lately, sparked viral misinformation.

We fact-checked four claims Vance made during his interview with Bash:

Vance: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”

This is inaccurate. Vance calling attention to Springfield has intensified news coverage about the city, but journalism about the community’s immigration concerns predate the “cat memes” — a phrase Vance has used when calling on his supporters to amplify the baseless claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets.

(Screenshots from X)

Trump and Vance started mentioning or sharing “cat memes” related to the claims about Haitian migrants Sept. 10, before Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia.

Local and national news organizations have been reporting on the influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for months. 

• In October 2023, Dayton Daily News, a local newspaper, reported on challenges Haitian immigrants faced when trying to work in Springfield, Ohio. 

• In December 2023, Al Jazeera reported on rising tensions in Springfield after an 11-year-old boy died in a school bus crash, prompting anger that was directed toward the city’s entire Haitian community. A Haitian national drove a minivan into the bus, causing the crash.

• The local newspaper Springfield News-Sun has consistently reported on Haitian migrants living in Springfield, including in April, June and August. 

• A local TV station covered an Aug. 8 community discussion about how to help combat racist and hateful speech directed at Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio. 

• On Aug. 12 2024, NPR published “How Springfield, Ohio, took center stage in the election immigration debate.” The article featured Vance’s remarks about immigration in Springfield, but it didn’t mention migrants eating pets, cats, dogs or geese.

• The New York Times on Sept. 3 examined how some Springfield residents turned on the city’s Haitian migrants after the 2023 bus crash. This also predated Trump and Vance’s claims about pets being harmed.

Some of the national news coverage followed Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck’s July 8 letter to federal lawmakers about the city’s housing shortage amid population growth. Heck copied Vance on the correspondence.

News organizations were not covering stories of migrants eating pets before the claims started  gaining traction on social media, but that’s because there was no evidence it happened. PolitiFact’s first fact-check of those False claims published Sept. 9, the same day Vance wrote an X post amplifying the baseless reports and connecting it to “Haitian illegal immigrants.”

Vance: “My constituents have brought approximately a dozen separate concerns to me. Ten of them are verifiable and confirmable.”

Vance’s spokesperson provided no specific details about the 10 concerns Vance said were “verifiable and confirmable.” 

However, Springfield’s city spokesperson, mayor and city police all said they have investigated claims that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating residents’ pets and found them to be unfounded. The claim appeared to stem from an unverified, secondhand Facebook post.

PolitiFact and numerous other news organizations have investigated the claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, and concluded they are baseless falsehoods. 

The same morning Vance made these statements on CNN, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and rejected the claim of pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, calling it “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”

A mural in Springfield, Ohio, the small midwestern city at the center of the national immigration debate, Sept. 12, 2024. (Maria Ramirez Uribe / PolitiFact)

Vance: The “American media” said “it was baseless that migrants were capturing the geese from the local park pond and eating them. And yet there are 911 calls from well before this ever became a viral sensation of people complaining about that exact thing happening.” 

This is misleading: Vance’s campaign pointed to callers’ reports that wildlife had been taken from the park, but officials investigated these reports and found no credible evidence to support them.  

On Aug. 26, a man reported seeing a group of four people whom he presumed to be Haitians stealing geese in Springfield, Ohio. Another caller claimed on March 27 to have seen “three people grab a live duck and goose, place them in a trash bag, and drive away.” 

Ohio Department of Natural Resources spokesperson Karina Cheung told PolitiFact in a Sept. 14 email that the agency found “no supporting evidence” for the claim that Haitians were abducting wildlife from local parks.

“Upon follow-up, no supporting evidence was found of wildlife being illegally removed from the park in either case,” Cheung said.

Clark County Commission President Melanie Flax Wilt called claims of wildlife abductions in local parks “false” and an “urban legend.” Another county commissioner said the claim is unsubstantiated, with no videos, pictures or dead geese having surfaced.

A church sign is seen at House of Prayer on Sept. 14, 2024, near the First Haitian Church and community center in Springfield, Ohio. (AP)

Vance: The Haitian migrants “are in the country through what’s called temporary protective status. That is when Kamala Harris waved a magic amnesty wand, taking people and giving them legal status.”

Temporary Protected Status, sometimes abbreviated as TPS, is a provisional benefit granted to some immigrants from certain countries that are considered unsafe. The status allows those immigrants to temporarily live and work in the U.S. Although people with this status can be deported under certain conditions — for example, if they commit a violent crime — the Department of Homeland Security cannot detain or deport them based on their immigration status alone.

Vance spoke about Temporary Protected Status as if it were a problematic workaround, but Congress established this program with bipartisan support “as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 to provide humanitarian relief to citizens whose countries were suffering from natural disasters, protracted unrest, or conflict,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following the 7 magnitude earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, former President Barack Obama’s administration announced a Temporary Protected Status designation for Haitian nationals who were then in the United States. 

In 2017, Trump extended the designation to help Haitians. 

In 2023, the Biden administration started a humanitarian parole program that allows eligible Haitians to live and work in the U.S. for two years. In June, he extended and expanded Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status. 

PolitiFact Deputy Editor Rebecca Catalanello and Staff Writers Jeff Cercone, Maria Ramirez Uribe and Loreben Tuquero contributed to this report.

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