More on Trump, Vance, and Springfield

The Legal/Illegal Frame Revisited

Last week, I decried the false statements made by former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance suggesting that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets, linking these accusations to a long history in the U.S. of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant fabrications. I also called on Ohio’s Catholic bishops to condemn these actions, or even to impose ecclesiastical discipline, such as withholding communion, on Vance, a Catholic. Since then, Trump and Vance’s hateful rhetoric, which is based on rumors spread on social media, has continued unabated, but on September 19, the Catholic bishops of Ohio did issue a statement defending the dignity of migrants and condemning false “gossip” against the Haitian migrants living and working in Springfield.

The day before, Vance repeated a claim earlier made by Trump, falsely insisting that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are in the community illegally. He said, "If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.” Most of the Haitians in Springfield, however, possess what is called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a legal status that allows foreign nationals to reside and work in the United States when there is a serious natural disaster or armed conflict in their home country. Thousands of Haitians have been granted this status, first in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake in 2010, and more recently in 2021 as a result of the political turmoil in the country.

Contrary to Vance, then, these immigrants are here legally, and likewise, their status is not the result of an “illegal action”—the TPS program was created by an act of Congress in 1990 and is lawfully administered by the executive branch. The sliver of truth in Vance’s statement is that some TPS recipients may have previously been in the U.S. illegally, perhaps because they had entered without authorization while claiming asylum, but many recipients may have already been in the U.S. legally on a temporary basis, for example on a student visa or a temporary work visa. And regardless, their prior unauthorized status is not relevant to their current status, let alone the legality of the TPS program in general.

J.D. Vance (Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

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As with the original claims about eating dogs and cats, however, these false statements regarding the legal status of the immigrants in Springfield are not factual mistakes; when confronted with the truth, their purveyors are not going to correct themselves and apologize. The statements are an attempt to spread a particular narrative about immigrants meant to inspire fear and hatred for the sake of political mobilization.

In an article published in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies back in 2020 called “Interrogating the Legal/Illegal Frame: Trump Administration Immigration Policy and the Christian Response,” I noted this tactic of blurring the distinction between “legal” and “illegal,” which was already evident during the Trump presidency (an electronic version of the article should be available to most readers with access to a university library, but if you don’t have access, email me for a copy at matthew_shadle@outlook.com). Indeed, Trump and officials in his administration used rhetorical ploys similar to those we are seeing today to cast the shadow of illegality or criminality on legal immigrants. For example, Trump criticized recipients of family reunification visas, by far the most common form of legal immigration to the U.S., as recipients of “chain migration,” a “sick and demented system,” declaring them to be “not the people we want” in the U.S. Similarly, the program for admitting refugees was essentially shut down because its beneficiaries were allegedly “unvetted,” suggesting they may be terrorists or criminals, and women and young people fleeing gang violence in Central America were accused by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions of taking advantage of “loopholes” in the asylum system. This rhetorical strategy of portraying even legal immigrants as nebulously “illegal” or “criminal” creates permission for opposing legal avenues for migrating to the U.S.