Former President Donald J. Trump had been in office for less than six months when he made clear his disdain for people from Haiti, offering a revealing prelude to his recent embrace of false rumors about Haitians eating pets in an Ohio town.
He insisted that immigrants from Haiti should not be let into the United States, shocking his chief of staff, secretary of state, homeland security secretary and others gathered in the Oval Office by declaring that people from the beleaguered nation “all have AIDS.”
Now, as he runs for a second term, Mr. Trump is once again denigrating Haitians, part of a pattern that goes back years and appears to have its , when the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, driving years of panic about the newly discovered disease.
Mr. Trump, a self-described germophobe, has persisted in that debunked belief even though it was nearly four decades ago.
“We have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem,” the former president told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, in October 2021. “Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it.”
In his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Mr. Trump singled out Haitians for ridicule. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said. “They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” He promised to conduct mass deportations of Haitians if he returns to the White House.
Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, continue to amplify the rumors, even though Ohio’s governor has called the statements “garbage” and many residents call it ridiculous. The furor has led to in Springfield, upending life in the city.
But for Mr. Trump, the statements are nothing new.
At the beginning of 2018, Mr. Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers that he had no intention of supporting bipartisan legislation that would provide new ways for Haitians to immigrate to the United States legally.
“Wait a minute,” he lectured them in an Oval Office meeting. “Why do we want people from Haiti here?” He said that Haiti was among a series of “shithole countries” whose people had little to offer. Can’t we just leave Haiti out, he asked the lawmakers. The legislation never passed and Mr. Trump worked to make it harder for Haitians to immigrate.
His administration canceled temporary protected status, a program that seeks to provide refuge to people fleeing violence and natural disasters, for tens of thousands of Haitians. And his officials stopped providing temporary work visas for Haitians just before the end of the president’s term.
Mr. Trump’s view didn’t change when Haiti was plunged into gang violence and chaos following the assassination of its president in July 2021. In the interview with Mr. Hannity, which came just three months after the assassination, Mr. Trump said of Haiti: “We let everybody come in. Sean, it’s like a death wish. It’s like a death wish for our country.”
But the unfounded concerns about Haitians and AIDS appear to be at the heart of Mr. Trump’s desire to keep them out.
Mr. Trump was living in New York City in the early 1980s, when the first reports appeared in the United States of a mysterious disease affecting the immune system. In 1982, the C.D.C. warned that the unknown disease was causing cancer and death in four main categories of people that came to be known as the “four H’s”: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians. The agency noted that a cluster of recent immigrants from Haiti had contracted the disease, along with the other groups.
The impact on Haiti and its people was swift. Tourism plummeted. Haitian immigrants in the United States were shunned and feared. News coverage of the health crisis often focused on Haitians, even after the C.D.C. reversed itself in 1985, taking Haitians off the list of people with special risk for the disease. It turned out, doctors said, that Haitians contracted the disease the same way others did: through unprotected sex, blood transfusions and dirty needles.
The issue continued to be hotly debated for some years, especially in New York City, where Mr. Trump was building his real estate empire.
There are no records of Mr. Trump publicly mentioning Haitians and AIDS at the time. But his comments while he was president, and since he left office, suggest that he has not forgotten the decades-old concerns.
“If you look at the stats, if you look at the numbers, if you look at just — take a look at what’s happening in Haiti, a tremendous problem with AIDS,” he told Mr. Hannity in the 2021 interview.
In fact, health officials say about 2 percent of Haiti’s population — or about 180,000 people — has H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. That is a higher percentage than in the United States, but far lower than in many African countries. There is little evidence that many of those infected are immigrating to the United States.
This article originally appeared in. © 2024 The New York Times
