The Haitian Times covered the false claims targeting Springfield. Now it’s also facing attacks

By Hadas Gold, CNN

New York (CNN) — Macollvie Neel, editor of the Haitian Times, was ready to start her workday from home on Monday when her doorbell rang. What she thought might be a delivery turned out to be more than a half-dozen police officers.

“I looked and there were police cruisers outside my house,” Neel recalled Tuesday in an interview with CNN.

When she opened the door, Neel said officers explained that “someone had emailed an [organization] saying they had killed their wife for being racist toward Haitians at my address.”

The hoax report that sent officers rushing to her home, known as a type of swatting, left Neel feeling alarmed and worried for her safety as well as for the staff of The Haitian Times, where she serves as executive editor. But Monday’s incident is just the latest example of the threats and attacks she and her colleagues have faced since former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance amplified debunked conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Haitian Times, an online publication, has covered Haiti and the Haitian diaspora around the world since it was founded in 1999. With a newsroom of about 20 staffers and freelancers, the outlet has documented the flow of Haitians across the United States, beyond the traditional enclaves of New York, South Florida and Massachusetts.

Springfield, Ohio, was already on the Haitian Times’ radar well before the conspiracy theories began. The town had been depressed for years, with a shrinking population until new manufacturing plants began opening up. But locals weren’t filling the thousands of jobs created, so the town became a magnet for legal Haitian immigrants who came seeking work and a place to raise their families.

While the newcomers have been largely welcomed by the community, some longtime residents have voiced concern about strained local resources and safety, issues the Haitian Times has covered for its readership. Other issues have been more sinister. Last month, a small group of masked white supremacists, part of a neo-Nazi group, marched through downtown Springfield in what they called an “anti-Haitian Immigration march.”

Then, last week, Vance posted about a viral false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in the community, and Trump mentioned the conspiracy theory on the debate stage. The Haitian Times covered the comments aggressively — describing them as racist and false.

Neel said she and other Haitians had already been the subject of harassment. But after Vance’s post and the debate, the issue exploded.

“People who are anti-Haitian, anti-immigrant, just felt like they had carte blanche to just call or email or go on people’s Facebook pages and just ratchet up the harassment,” Neel said.

Reports began pouring into the publication’s newsroom of Haitian immigrants receiving harassing phone calls and children and teens bullied. Parents were fearful to send their children to school. Dozens of bomb threats later shut down schools and municipal buildings in Springfield following Trump’s promotion of the false claims.

The day after the debate, The Haitian Times published an article reporting that Haitian immigrant families in Ohio were “under attack” amid the intense swirl of false claims. And Neel herself said she was the target of some of the most direct racism she’s experienced in her life. Within the past week, Neel said she received an email “with a subject line that was just ‘N-word’ — that’s literally what the subject line was.”

“This was the first time in my life that someone had been explicitly that racist to my face,” she added.

Other prominent Haitians have also been the target of police swatting attempts, Neel said.

“The message is pretty clear that they know where we live. They can get to us if they really want to,” Neel said. “It’s just an intimidation, fascist tactic to silence people.”

After the neo-Nazi march in August, the Haitian Times planned to hold one of its regular town-hall style “community conversations” in Springfield for September. With the national spotlight on the community, the issue became even more paramount.

But what was supposed to be an in-person gathering to discuss, reflect and support one another had to be moved to a virtual conversation due to ongoing threats targeting the community. Springfield’s city manager told the publication that it could not guarantee the safety of its staff, Haitian Times founder Garry Pierre-Pierre told CNN.

“I’m angered but we’re very much resolved,” Pierre-Pierre said in the wake of the attacks. “We left Haiti under a fascist dictatorship, so we won’t let a fascist minority silence us. We will cover this story, we will take precautions, but we will not be silenced.”

Neel said the outlet had reached out to the Trump campaign following the debate for comment but isn’t planning to ask for an interview.

“Unless it’s an apology and a retraction, which I don’t think is ever going to happen, I personally don’t even want to hear it,” she said. “We already know what they’re going to say in a lot of ways, so we have to just prioritize getting what’s important out for our community to help us actually fight back, which is what we have to do, and we have to do it in a very sophisticated way.”

Neel said they are now urgently focusing on ways to protect the outlet’s staff both online and in person, including raising funds to help support security for their staff — a prospect she once considered unimaginable.

“This is America,” Neel said. “This is where we’re supposed to have the freedom to pursue liberty, justice and happiness.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.