By Naba’a Muhammad
Donald Trump and his veep pick are hating on Haitian immigrants in weird statements about migrants eating pets and vows to deport Haitians, who can qualify for temporary protective status because of horrible conditions at home, if elected.
“We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio,” Trump vowed Sept. 13, said the Associated Press.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said in a presidential debate with Democrat Kamala Harris.
Vance declared Springfield suffers from “a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime.”
Vance repeated the falsehoods and added a few Sept. 15 in CNN and Meet The Press interviews.
The claims have been debunked as lies, all of them.
Trump-Vance anti-Blackness reflects a heartlessness toward Haiti that comes from America in word and in deed.
“Haiti is Black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black or forgiven the Almighty for making her Black,” said Frederick Douglass, the legendary freedom fighter and ambassador to Haiti, January 2, 1893, in Chicago during the World’s Fair.
“To their shame be it spoken, men in high American quarters have boasted to me of their ability to start a revolution in Haiti at pleasure,” he continued.
“Others of a speculative turn of mind and who have money to lend at high rates of interest are glad to conspire with revolutionary chiefs of either faction, to enable them to start a bloody insurrection. … They are sharks, pirates and Shylocks, greedy for money, no matter at what cost of life and misery to mankind.”
The sharks, pirates and Shylocks continue to bleed the first Black Republic, which defeated the French to take her freedom.
From 1915 to 1934, U.S. Marines occupied Haiti installing a puppet president. A treaty gave America control of Haiti’s finances, a military force, and the ability to intervene at will.
President Woodrow Wilson had $500,000 taken from Haiti’s national bank and moved to New York for “safekeeping.”
Strikes and uprisings followed until U.S. forces physically left in 1934 but kept control inside the country.
The murderous Duvalier family rose to power in 1957. The U.S. backed the regime in its fight against communism. Duvalier corruption and brutality were notorious with the Tonton Macoute, a killer private army, terrorizing the country.
Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier declared himself president for life in 1964. When he died in 1971 his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, took over.
Repression and poverty drove thousands out of the country by boat. Their bodies often turned up on the shores of Florida.
In 1986, revolts drove Baby Doc out of power and into exile in France.
Successive political leaders moved into the space until popular, onetime priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide won Haiti’s first free election in 1990. He was overthrown in a 1991 military coup that sent Haiti into chaos. He was restored to power in 1994 and reelected in 2001.
“But U.S. leaders did not like the direction Haiti’s restored democracy took,” wrote Sasha Filippova, Kristina Fried, and Brian Concannon for ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
The U.S. resented Aristide for “trying to raise the minimum wage for workers sewing Americans’ clothes, defying ‘small government’ dogma by increasing government investment in education and healthcare, speaking out against the unjust international order, and demanding $21 billion from France as restitution of the ‘independence debt’ that France extorted in 1825,” they said.
In 2004, U.S. Marines took Aristide out of Haiti and to the Central African Republic. “The flight consummated a coup d’état that ended a decade of hard-won democratic progress,” the writers added.
Haiti has suffered through American meddling, poverty, corruption, protests, food shortages, UN delivered cholera, and a 2010 earthquake that killed up to 300,000, while destroying much of Port-au-Prince and other parts of the country.
In 2017, Jovenel Moise took over as president and political gridlock gripped Haiti. He was assassinated four years later.
In February, former Drug Enforcement Agency informant Joseph Vincent was sentenced to life in prison in Miami federal court for his part in the death of Moise. Three others in the case worked as federal informants at some point.
“I don’t know who killed Jovenel Moïse, but I know the U.S. is not a neutral party,” said Ezili Danto of the Free Haiti Movement in July, 2021.
Haitian authorities in 2021 announced the arrest of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who had expressed a desire to lead Haiti, and was identified as a physician and Christian pastor.
AP reported, “The associate, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, said Sanon told him he was approached by people claiming to represent the U.S. State and Justice departments who wanted to install him as president.”
“He said the plan was for Moïse to be arrested, not killed, and Sanon would not have participated if he knew Moïse would be assassinated.”
In February, Sanon was charged in federal court with conspiring to kidnap or kill Moïse.
According to Haiti’s National Police chief, at the time, “officers found a hat with the logo of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 20 boxes of bullets, gun parts, four license plates from the Dominican Republic, two cars and correspondence, among other things, in Sanon’s house in Haiti.”
Danto pointed a finger at America.
She cited U.S. control of Haitian politicians through DEA knowledge of drug dealing and corruption, and the use of wealthy oligarchs to keep Haitians traumatized.
Recordings the night of the assassination captured voices in English calling on presidential security to stand down, saying the DEA was conducting an operation.
The DEA, of course, denied any role in the political murder.
So we should not be surprised by extreme, hateful rhetoric from the Trump-Vance team. Nor actions that cause the suffering and death of Haitians.
All of this has a long history and we should not expect the enemy of Black people to change.
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