The stunning truth behind Trump’s ‘Haitian immigrants eat pets’ claim

“They’re eating the dogs!” said Republican candidate Donald Trump during the presidential debate on Tuesday, September 10, while his Democrat rival, Kamala Harris, reacted in disbelief.

Former president Trump was attacking Harris over what he claims is uncontrolled immigration in the U.S., and chose to use a fringe online claim from the town of Springfield, Ohio to bolster his arguments.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” said Trump. He was fact checked live by debate co-moderator David Muir of ABC News who said that city officials had debunked the claim.

The truth of the eating pets claim

Now, in a wonderful piece of journalism, Newsguard has tracked down the original sources of the claim that Haitians eat pets in Ohio (give them a click, they deserve it), and it turns out the rumor was based on third-hand hearsay.

The person who wrote the original post on Facebook was Erika Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker, who says she heard the rumor from her neighbor, Kimberley Newton.

Newton meanwhile said she wasn’t sure she was “the most credible source” because she didn’t “actually know the person who lost the cat, explaining to NewsGuard it was “an acquaintance of a friend” (rather than her daughter’s friend, as Lee wrote in her Facebook post). Newton said she heard the story from the friend who in turn had heard it from “a source”, which might have been the cat owner or yet another person who knew the alleged cat owner.

As NewsGuard succinctly points, that means we have three people with “no firsthand knowledge of the allegedly victimized cat”. And we have nobody actually saying it happened to their pet.

Added to the lack of any claim of firsthand knowledge is the fact that city officials say they have no evidence of any pets being stolen, eaten or injured by individuals from the immigrant population in Springfield.

Taking these facts together, any reasonable person would have to accept that the claim has been fully debunked.

How the claim got to Donald Trump and the entire world

The baseless claim made it all the way to the presidential debate from Lee’s now deleted post on a private Springfield Facebook group named “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” by being screenshotted and posted to X on September 5 by a conservative user @BuckeyeGirrl, it then got widely amplified by conservative influencers before being picked up by Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, and from there to Donald Trump, who decided to use it in his debate with Kamala Harris.