During Tuesday night’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated the baseless claim that immigrants are eating people’s pets.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
This story first appeared on NPR’s live blog of the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. See how the night unfolds.
It was understood that immigration would be at the heart of Tuesday night’s presidential debate. What was more surprising was that the conversation turned to bizarre lies about migrants eating pet dogs and cats in Ohio.
While certainly bizarre, these accusations are not unprecedented. In fact, there is a long history of accusing immigrants of eating cats and dogs.
To be clear, over the past few days, Vice presidential candidate JD Vance has reiterated a rumor about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people’s pets. Springfield, a city of about 60,000 people, has taken in 15,000 to 20,000 migrants in the past four years, many of them from Haiti.
Mayor Rob Rue recently told NPR that the influx has left the city struggling with basic infrastructure. Schools and hospitals are stretched thin, and the existing housing crisis has been exacerbated. It’s led to tensions, as well as unfounded rumors of gang activity, voodoo practices, and the eating of park cats, dogs, and ducks.
Springfield police have denied the allegations.
But stories of migrants eating pets spread like wildfire across social media, as did memes and AI images of former President Donald Trump rescuing kittens and dogs in the hours leading up to the debate.
It has even been brought into debate.
“They’re eating dogs, people who come in here, they’re eating cats,” Trump said in response to a question about immigration. “They’re eating the pets of the people who live there, and that’s what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
Vice President Harris looked away and laughed at the comments while moderator David Muir stepped in, saying there were no credible reports of pets being harmed by the immigrant community in Springfield.
But by the time the debate was over, THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS was trending on the X platform.
Fear and loathing of immigrant foods has a long history in America. Italians were once labeled as “garlic eater”Writer Gustavo Arellano wrote about how a bean-based diet led to the vilification of Mexicans. The stereotype of immigrants eating cats and dogs was also recounted, often hurled at Asian Americans.
“The dog meat stereotype has long been used to demean Asians and Asian immigrants,” Written by Jean Rachel Bahk in the literary magazine Inlandia. “I was constantly bothered about whether the meat in the side dishes I brought for lunch was dog,” she recalled of her own childhood.
“Although I repeatedly tried to explain that eating dog meat is not a common practice among Asians, let alone Asian Americans, I began to beg my mother to stop cooking me Korean food.”
In recent speeches Trump has also likening immigrants to Hannibal Lectercannibal in movies The Silence of the Lambs. Ultimately, both accusations have one thing in common: these people are here to destroy us and what we hold dear.
“I saw them,” Springfield Republican Committee member Glenda Bailey recently told NPR about the Haitian migrants, echoing the concepts of the Great Replacement theory. “What they did was replace the population in Springfield, Ohio.”
After the debate, social media was flooded with comments from people who couldn’t believe that part of the presidential debate had focused on pets being eaten by humans. But that’s not surprising: Over the past few years, Republican rhetoric on immigration has become increasingly vitriolic, according to a study from Stanford University.
The study used AI to map the tone of more than 200,000 speeches since the 1880s and found that the hostile tone in how Republicans discuss immigration today is strikingly similar to the tone used against Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, when they were the target of the first nationwide immigration restrictions.
And at Tuesday night’s debate, these issues were once again brought to the attention of millions of Americans by the party’s presidential nominee.
