1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

I am writing as a constituent to urge you to speak out forcefully against the planned mass deportation of Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio--and to use every tool at your disposal to stop it. As Timothy Snyder documents, Springfield’s Haitian community was invited here legally through federal programs and has helped drive the city’s economic recovery, opening businesses, working difficult jobs, and stabilizing neighborhoods that had been in decline for decades. The current push to strip their protected status and remove them is not a response to crime or chaos on the ground; it is the result of a manufactured (a)moral panic built on lies about “overwhelmed” schools, “savagery,” and JD Vance’s fabricated stories of Haitians eating pets and wildlife. Those rumors have been repeatedly debunked by local officials and journalists, even as they have triggered bomb threats, Nazi marches, and real danger for Haitian families who now fear leaving their homes. Expelling thousands of workers and neighbors under these conditions would not only devastate Springfield’s fragile economic progress, it would also mark a profound break with basic American commitments to equal protection and freedom from racial terror. Yanking our Haitian residents’ Temporary Protected Status visas just so that they can be removed is a stain on all Americans white telling us its unsafe to even travel to Haiti. When elected leaders knowingly recycle fantasies that extremists then weaponize on the ground, deportation becomes not an “enforcement action” but instead a state‑sanctioned act of ethnic cleansing. That is unacceptable in a constitutional democracy--and especially dangerous in a moment when authoritarian movements are explicitly testing how far they can go. I am asking you to do four concrete things: 1) Publicly denounce the targeting of Springfield’s Haitians as discriminatory and illegitimate. 2) Support immediate extension and expansion of Temporary Protected Status and other lawful pathways so these residents are not thrust back into deadly conditions. 3) Back federal, state, and local protections that limit the ability of ICE to carry out mass raids based on racist disinformation rather than public safety needs. 4) Please also use your platform to correct the record about Springfield and to stand with the local leaders, civil rights groups, and Haitian community members who have been working for years to build a functioning, multiracial city in the face of escalating threats. I vote in every election and I will be watching your response to this closely. Springfield is a test of whether we will allow fascist fantasies to dictate who counts as American. I urge you to be on the record, now, on the side of truth and of the Haitian families whose lives and futures hang in the balance.