So what IS the truth about the city where Trump claims migrants are eating the pet cats and dogs? GREG WOODFIELD visits Springfield, Ohio, to find neo-Nazis are marching, residents in utter despair – and even talk of gun battles breaking out…

For better or – more likely – worse, it was vintage Trump.

‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,’ the 78-year-old presidential nominee declared in his debate with Kamala Harris. ‘The people that came in – they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.’

To a stunned audience of 67 million Americans – and countless more around the world – Trump was inflaming explosive social media rumours that ­Haitian immigrants had descended on a small ­Midwestern city and were stealing pets for food.

The debate’s moderator, ABC’s David Muir, slapped down the ex-president, saying: ‘The city manager told us there were no credible reports of pets being harmed… by the immigrant community.’

Trump shot back: ‘I’ve seen people on television… saying, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’

‘So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.’

The local police department later announced that it had ‘no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community’.

‘Trump Repeats False Claim About Immigrants,’ sniffed The New York Times. ‘Racist smear,’ declared The Washington Post. ‘Baseless claim,’ insisted the BBC. Case closed? Perhaps so.

Yet the extraordinary allegations have drawn unwelcome attention to a small city that, as the Mail discovered this week, has been left reeling by a dramatic recent surge in mass migration.

When we visited Springfield this week, the mood was febrile.

On the day we arrived, soon after Trump’s claims, a bomb threat ‘using hateful ­language towards immigrants and Haitians’, according to the mayor, had closed down both the City Hall and an elementary school.

In downtown Springfield, military veteran Ken McGravy, 68, stressed that he had no proof that pets were being stolen, though he did claim there were ‘suspiciously’ fewer wild birds in the city’s ­Snyder Park.

He added: ‘There’s a lot of hatred in Springfield – a lot of rednecks who are really racist.

‘I was born in Springfield and I genuinely fear that, knowing the place as I do, bullets might start to fly.’

Indeed, Springfield has become a case study for America’s increasingly toxic immigration debate.

Overall, some 11 million illegal migrants are believed to be living in the US – a significant proportion of whom entered under Joe Biden’s presidency. Alongside abortion rights, the issue is among the most crucial in November’s election.

Since 2020, about 15,000 Haitians have ­settled in Springfield – meaning that about one in five people in the small city now hails from an impoverished Caribbean country 1,600 miles away.

Haiti is a failed state, racked by lawlessness and violence inflicted by bloodthirsty gangs who control 90 per cent of its territory.

Thousands of Haitians have been killed or injured in gang warfare this year alone; 180,000 children are currently displaced; the vast majority of the country is at risk of starvation and earlier this year corpses littered the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince amid a total breakdown of law and order.

Though many Haitians are in Springfield legally and have work permits, the speed of the influx and the extent of the cultural differences have led to tensions between the new arrivals and some of those who have always called the city home.

During a city commission meeting last month, one long-term Springfield resident alleged: ‘These Haitians are [driving] into trash cans, running into buildings, they’re flipping cars in the middle of the streets.

‘They’re in the park, grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them. They’re eating them.’ 

This week, The New York Post reported claims that a Springfield resident called 911 to report seeing four Haitian migrants snatching geese near a city park, according to an audio recording and police report obtained by the conservative Federalist news outlet. Police have not disputed the story’s legitimacy. 

Another Springfield woman went viral online recently after pleading with city officials: ‘It is so unsafe… I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me, throwing mattresses… [and] throwing trash.

‘Look at me, I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn’t defend myself if I had to.’ She added that she and her elderly husband had decided they will leave their home of 45 years.

Unlike many Midwestern cities, Springfield is visibly regenerating after half a century of economic decline. Amazon runs a large distribution centre and is planning to build a 100,000 sq ft $30million warehouse outside the town.

Neat redbrick buildings house coffee shops and bistros. Colourful murals celebrating the city adorn walls. Road signs proclaim: ‘Springfield, find your unwind.’

But, when we spoke to Priscilla Marrs, 53, as she waited to pick up her daughter Courtney from her job at Dunkin’ Donuts, she didn’t mince her words. ‘There’s wrecks everywhere. You have to watch it when you drive around here. The crashes, it’s cos of them [the ­Haitians].’

She added: ‘They follow you around when you’re in Walmart. You just can’t go anywhere without them taking all the groceries [stealing from you].’

Courtney was equally vocal, saying: ‘I don’t care for ’em. I used to work with them almost four years in a factory. They’re rude, they’re disrespectful. I feel like they’re taking all of our good stuff away from us Americans, like our cars, our housing, our jobs.’

Outside City Hall, shuttered due to the bomb threat, Amazon worker and mother-of-three ­Jessica McNair was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a famous photograph of Trump raising his fist after surviving an assassination attempt in July.

‘This is our country,’ she told us. ‘Then they come here, get housing, they get a car, they get welfare. What about our homeless people being kicked out of their houses just so they can put Haitians in them? They should just go back to their country. This ain’t Springfield, it’s Little Haiti.’

Despite these concerns, none of the Springfield residents we spoke to told us they had seen Haitians stealing or eating pets. So where did the bizarre rumours start?

On August 16, police in the Ohio city of Canton – 170 miles from Springfield – arrested a woman who had reportedly stamped on a cat’s head then eaten the animal in front of horrified witnesses.

In shocking bodycam footage, officers order the suspect to put her hands behind her back, one saying: ‘Someone got rubber gloves? She’s covered in blood.’

An officer orders the woman: ‘Smile for me. Did you eat that cat? Did you eat it?’ The woman bares her teeth and shakes her head. ‘Why’d you kill it?’ he demands. Allexis Ferrell, 27, was arrested on charges of ‘prohibitions concerning companion ­animals, cruelty to animals and disorderly conduct’.

A police report claimed she was found ‘squatting on a cat which appeared to have its head smashed in and the female with her hands on it… with fur on her lips and blood on her hands’.

The report added: ‘Officers were able to determine that Allexis had smashed the cat’s head with her foot then began to eat the cat.’

Ms Ferrell, who is black, is a US national – not Haitian – and Canton police confirmed: ‘She is a lifelong Canton resident.’

Yet that did not stop malicious individuals from circulating the revolting footage online for their own purposes.

One YouTube video, since removed, was falsely titled: Haitian Woman Eats Neighbour’s Cat in Springfield. The same footage has likely been viewed millions of times across X/Twitter and other social media sites, and remains in frequent circulation today, often wrongly claiming Ms Ferrell is Haitian.

It appears that this disturbed woman’s case was weaponised to drum up hatred against migrants in Springfield and, by extension, across America – with the election less than two months away.

In Springfield, tensions have been running especially high amid a raft of driving accidents allegedly caused by Haitian migrants.

Last August, a minivan driven by a 36-year-old Haitian immigrant without a licence collided head-on with a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy and hospitalising 20 other children. The victim’s father urged: ‘Don’t spin this towards hate.’

But it may be too late for that. Last month Blood Tribe, an armed neo-Nazi group led by a former US marine, marched in Springfield waving swastika flags and yelling racist slogans.

‘I’ve come to bring a word of warning,’ one of the group’s leaders, another former marine, told a town forum this month. ‘Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.’

Another neo-Nazi outfit in Ohio, Active Club, wrote on its Telegram social media channel recently: ‘The thousands of Haitian and West African invaders currently being housed in Ohio all have a tribe. Here’s ours.’

In this context, it is surely incumbent on the Trump campaign to avoid escalating tensions further. But even before the debate, the ex-president had posted AI-generated ‘memes’ on his Truth Social account showing cats wearing red Make America Great Again hats.

Two days ago, at a campaign stop in Arizona, Trump doubled down on his claims: ‘A recording of 911 calls show that [Springfield] residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. 

‘They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are? In the park, in the lake. And even walking off with their pets. ‘My dog’s been taken! My dog’s been stolen!’

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate JD Vance – Ohio’s junior senator – has also done his best to inflame the rumours.

Vance, who attracted accusations of misogyny after a 2021 interview in which he had called his Democrat opponents ‘childless cat ladies’, wrote online this week: ‘My office has [recently] received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbours’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.

‘It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumours will turn out to be false. Do you know what’s confirmed?

‘That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here [apparently a reference to the deadly school bus crash]… that communicable diseases – like TB and HIV – have been on the rise.

‘That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t know English. That rents have risen so fast.’

Similarly, Ted Cruz, a Texas senator and former Republican presidential candidate, gleefully posted a picture of kittens alongside a caption urging Americans to vote for Trump ‘so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us’.

At Springfield’s bustling Rose Goute Creole Restaurant, manager Romane Pierre, 41, told the Mail he feared for the consequences of all this.

‘Many people in our community are shocked by Donald Trump’s words and genuinely fear what could happen next,’ he said.

‘Some are considering leaving Springfield. Haitians in this town don’t have guns – but Americans do. Let me tell you, Haitians don’t eat dogs, they don’t eat cats. My people, they like goat.’

Pierre fled Port-au-Prince in 2020 after his computer business was ransacked by an armed gang and he was told his life was under threat.

‘It’s chaos in Haiti,’ he said. ‘I feared for my life and felt I had no alternative but to leave. Here we feel we have some security and with hard work and ambition we can make something of ourselves.’

He pointed to a large floral arrangement on the restaurant counter. ‘A lot of Americans come in here. They like Haitians. After the presidential debate, some of them brought us those flowers. There’s hope.’

At Springfield’s Haitian Community Help And Support Center, Rose-Thamar Joseph, 40, told us she fled Port-au-Prince four years ago after a gang stopped her car and shot at it, apparently in a targeted attack. ‘We were stuck in traffic. This gang came out and just started shooting.

‘That kind of thing happens all the time there. Shootings, kidnappings – nobody can feel safe.’

Despite the escalating tensions in her adopted country, she said: ‘I just want to say to the American people: thank you.’

There is no doubt that the surge of migrants arriving in America – and across the West – brings with it concerns about assimilation and access to shared resources.

But this troubling story also tells us much about the power of information in the social media age – and the willingness of

some people to bend the facts to suit themselves.