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(Photo illustration by The Bulwark/Photos by Reuters, Getty)
by Andrew Egger
Springfield, Ohio
They buried Pierre Damas Bel on Saturday. That night, Donald Trump came to town to take a victory lap on the policies that killed him.
It’s been a bit more than a month since Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian who had come to the United States legally as a high schooler in 2024, threw himself under a truck on the interstate—a death of despair following the revocation of his legal status by the Trump administration this summer. Among the hundreds gathered to mourn Saturday at Springfield’s St. John Missionary Baptist Church, the grief was still raw and immediate.
The banners on the church walls proclaimed messages of scriptural comfort: “Jehovah Shammah: The Lord is always present. Jehovah Rophe: The Lord heals.” As family members audibly wailed and sobbed, the ministers asked God in English and Haitian Creole for consolation amid heartbreak.
“You are near the brokenhearted. We pray that you would draw near us today,” prayed Pastor Ernie Brown of St. John. “When questions have no answers, give them strength to trust you with what we cannot understand.”
Many unanswerable questions hung over Bel’s funeral. Here are two. How could a country extend such a shining future to a young man like him—only to shatter that future, and him, by suddenly ripping it away? And how could the president who made it happen show his face that same day, just miles down the road, not only to defend that change, but to bask in it?
Hours later, 25 miles away in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia, Trump spiked the football. “This is in honor of Springfield, Ohio,” he said, “a quaint little town of 32,000 people where they took in 35,000 people and put them into Springfield, and it didn’t work out too well. And they’re being removed.”
If there was ever a kid America’s immigration system was for, it was Pierre Damas Bel. America, to him, wasn’t just a safe haven from his broken homeland of Haiti. It was a place where he seemed destined to flourish.
Speakers recalled how Bel had distinguished himself in school, in athletics, socially, in junior ROTC, and at work. He had been bound for local Wittenberg University to play soccer on a scholarship; he intended to study neuroscience and hoped one day to open a hospital back in Haiti.
Bel couldn’t have known it, but his dream had started to die the same year he arrived—the year Republicans selected Springfield’s Haitians as their national scapegoat for Joe Biden’s immigration excesses, the year they became the targets of a million racist political lies: “They’re eating the dogs,” Trump blustered from a debate stage. “They’re eating the cats.”
This summer, the hammer dropped. The Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t really know that Trump’s attempt to evict the Haitians was motivated by racism, so who were the justices to put up a fuss? Just like that, the way was clear for Trump to transform America’s Haitian TPS recipients from a law-abiding, integrating community into illegal immigrants—no longer able to work, get driver’s licenses, or otherwise participate in society; systematically shackled with ankle monitors, under immediate threat of getting dragged into an ICE van and deported.
Maybe the most remarkable and heartrending thing about Bel’s story was this: He kept his faith in America almost to the end. Unable to play soccer at Wittenberg because of his ankle monitor, he instead enrolled at a nearby state school, Wright State.
According to his family, the last humiliation came at Wright State’s ROTC program. Because he was not an American citizen, Bel was ineligible to become an ROTC cadet; he was participating in the program as an elective.
Perhaps, at first, he saw this as a distinction without a difference. But then came the news that he, alone among his classmates, could not receive a ROTC uniform. He had embraced America; there was no mistaking the signs that America was not embracing him back.
He wanted to wear the cloth of the country. The country put an ankle monitor on him instead. Days later, he threw himself under a truck.
None of this had had to happen. “Our dear friend and brother may have died by suicide,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, at the funeral. “But he was killed by the system.”
How are the local Republicans feeling about all this? In theory, these are the beneficiaries of Trump’s policy toward the Haitians. But many don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the whole messy business. There’s an ambivalence, a sheepishness about the thing, even among some otherwise pot-committed Trump fans.
I learned this later on Saturday, in Vandalia, where Trump was scheduled to make his latest red-state rally ahead of next month’s midterms. Talking to MAGA voters outside in line, I was struck by how few were willing to offer a full-throated endorsement of the unpersoning of the Haitians.
When I asked Dayton resident Joe Brafford what he saw as Trump’s greatest accomplishment so far, he didn’t hesitate: “I like the fact that he closed down the border.” But when it came to the local Haitians, he was far more conflicted. “I wouldn’t have given them [temporary protected status] in the first place,” he said. “I think it was wrong, but they were given that status by Biden, and they have that status. So I don’t know how you in good conscience can just kick them all out. . . . It really is a dilemma.”
“I worked in construction for many years, and I had a crew of Mexican workers. A lot of them were illegals,” chimed in David Snavely, who was standing nearby. “Great guys. I mean, they were a great crew. I didn’t care about their status. All I cared about, none of them were bad people. They worked their ass off. Actually, they were better workers than some of the guys on the crew.”
“I feel sorry for the people that have been here a long time and are productive,” said Sharon Hardwick. “But at the same time, they’ve already overstayed a long time. And I think America’s economic system could fail if we keep all these people in our country and try to pay for everything that the Democrats want to pay for.”
Later, watching the rally unfold ahead of Trump’s arrival, I wondered if this twitch of discomfort explained why, despite the issue’s huge local salience, most speakers steered wide around it. Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Rep. Mike Turner, state party chair Alex Triantafilou—all came and went without a single mention, positive or negative, of the local Haitians.
And why not? These men were here, ahead of the midterms, to channel the crowd’s big, uncomplicated emotions: loyalty to Trump, enthusiasm for America’s supposed “golden age,” and fear of the Communist Takeover they insisted Democrats wanted to bring about. Many in the crowd may have wanted their Haitian neighbors gone, but they didn’t want to have to think about it much. Easier to ignore all that suffering just down the street then to grapple with the role you played in it.
But then came Trump, who had no such compunctions. Far from skirting around the issue, the president leaned in—dedicating his usual reading of the immigrant-panic poem “The Snake” to the people of Springfield.
(Photo by Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)
“Springfield, Ohio—do you know that story? It’s a very sad story,” Trump said. Springfield, he insisted, had been a “beautiful” and “idyllic” little town—“that’s a word they use in high scripture: ‘idyllic’”—until those Haitians showed up.
“It was an idyllic place. Was, is the better word. Not anymore, but it soon will be. They’re all being brought back to their country.”
This, too, was spiritual leadership—though of a very different sort than I’d seen at St. John. Trump spoke with the leering confidence of a decade of MAGA-rally experience—secure in the knowledge that a crowd never loves him more than when he gives them permission to indulge in a little communal vice. And he was right. Whatever scruples, whatever discomfort they might have had going in, the crowd abandoned them now. They grinned, laughed, and struck up a chant: “Deport! Deport! Deport!”
Trump says they’re all going back. For Pierre Damas Bel’s friends and family, the future is murky; whether they can stay, and for how long, still remains to be seen. But they won’t all be going back. They buried Pierre Damas Bel on Saturday. He’s here to stay.
Donate to the Haitian Support Center.
For those of us trying to educate ourselves on AI, I recommend an interview by Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic with Nobel physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI.” Hinton resigned from Google in May 2023 to speak out about the risks of AI.
A couple of excerpts:
The main message I got from [the Hugging Face incident] was these things that people said were all science fiction and these things would never conspire, and they would always do exactly what we wanted—as we feared, that was all nonsense. These things are very smart. They’re getting smarter all the time. They escape containment. They conspire with each other. They took over parts of OpenAI itself without OpenAI knowing. So they’re very dangerous already, and they’re getting more dangerous every time we make them smarter. . . .
There’s many different risks from AI. So there’s a whole bunch of risks to do with bad agents deliberately doing bad things with them. There’s a bunch of risks to do with just being negligent. And then there’s a separate set of risks, which is to do with AI itself taking over. And for a long time, people have been saying the risk from AI itself taking over is just science fiction. Well, it turns out they’re not.
–William Kristol
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